by Scott Todaro, Demandware Product Strategy

I don’t know about you, but recently I have been doing a majority of my shopping through my mobile device. Apparently, I am not the only one since retailers are starting to see their mobile revenue reach as high as 5% of their overall online revenue (Forrester reports that it is between 2-3% on average depending on company size). Billions of people worldwide rarely leave their house without their mobile phones and, as a result, PC’s are slowly becoming passé. 

Even though the mobile browsing experience can be rewarding, the one step in the process most shoppers find tedious is checking out. To type in all of your billing and shipping information on a tiny on-screen keyboard is downright painful.  In order to improve the mobile shopping experience, especially as it pertains to checkout, it is no surprise that retailers are turning to PayPal and Amazon Payments for driving conversion on the mobile web.

PayPal, for instance, recently launched their mobile Express Checkout which offers online retailers a more direct and simplified payment process. For consumers shopping on iPhones, Blackberrys and Android devices, PayPal’s mobile express checkout provides an effortless payment experience. With the understanding that shopping on the go has become more common, PayPal’s payment process ensures less complication and frustration. According to PayPal, Mobile PayPal transactions keep increasing and the company expects to see $500 million in mobile transactions this year.

Although integrating payment solutions into your mobile storefront or native application can be time consuming, Demandware offers pre-built integration code and documentation to both PayPal Express Checkout and Amazon Mobile Payment free for all customers. Check-out the Demandware LINK Marketplace to learn more about other free integrations.

By Kristyn Levine, Demandware Retail Practice

In the world of online retail, no place defines the difference between success and failure more than checkout. Recent industry reports put shopping cart abandonment rates at anywhere from 20 to 50%. In too many cases, cart checkout processes take too long, require too many clicks and involve too many requests for non-essential information. Shoppers get distracted, impatient and distressed. They lose interest, leave the site, or simply take a detour to shop and research at another online store. The result is a huge lost revenue opportunity.

Online customers abandon their shopping carts for lots of different reasons. Not all of them are in the merchant's control, but many are. With competition for new and existing customers as intense as ever, online retailers need to optimize their checkout processes to ensure they are doing everything they can to capitalize on existing opportunities by converting shoppers into customers and keeping customers coming back to their sites.

As a member of Demandware's Retail Practice team, my goal is to provide actionable recommendations based on best practice analysis and industry assessment. We are in the process of building a "best practices" engine to summarize a lot of what we know and periodically publish it in the form of a whitepaper. Here is my first piece - "Optimizing Online Checkout: 20 Practical Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment and Increase Online Profits". This paper highlights some of the most common checkout mistakes today, what online retailers can do to address them and provides examples of best practices in action. It also looks at some of the other factors that influence shopping cart conversion and how they might impact your own performance. I hope you find it valuable - and most importantly actionable.

In a recent Shop.org survey, The State of Retailing Online 2009: Merchandising Report, conducted by Forrester Research, 79% of retailers said they plan to focus heavily on improving customers' checkout experience in 2010. The best practices and recommendations in this paper are a good start. They can be implemented one at a time, or many at once, but they all can help you increase shopper conversion rates and increase profitability. I encourage you to download this paper and evaluate your site against these 20 best practices and get started today!