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!