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Online retailers roll out holiday promotions this week to combat high shopping cart abandonment rates.

Two thirds of online retailers are rolling out holiday promotions this week or have already done so. 61% of holiday promotions this year will be focused around free shipping, and 29% on promotional discounts. Multi-buy and free product offers will account for only 10%. (…)

When customers make purchases online, on average 3 out of every 10 that start the shopping cart process go all the way to complete the purchase. Seven out of 10 don’t and abandon the shopping cart. Shopping cart processes require visitors to fill in a form, submit personal details and click buttons. It’s a logical and completely rational process—at least to the ecommerce site.

But most buyers do not make purchases based solely on logic. This is where emotion comes in to play. Emotion is probably the single most important, and least understood, factor which makes the difference between a sale and a shopping cart abandonment.

Last week I caught up with Patrick Bultema, CEO of Codebaby, at the Conversion Conference. In the video interview below, I asked him about the ‘moments of truth’ that online visitors have when making purchases, and the critical role that emotion plays in many online purchases and shopping cart abandonment.

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So what can you do, during the crazy holiday season, to reduce shopping cart abandonment? We thought we’d put together a holiday season checklist to help you keep your customers in the shopping cart this Christmas. (…)

I get asked regularly about how CAN-SPAM and European Privacy Directive laws affect remarketing. In principle, compliance is very straightforward and often just requires a simple check of your website privacy policy to ensure that you’ve covered remarketing. Most companies can implement email-based remarketing campaigns without changes to their website or privacy policies. But it all depends on what your privacy policy says, on your opt-in and opt-out capabilities in your shopping cart, and in which countries you want to remarket. (…)

Lessons learned from Cyber Monday shopping trends 2009Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

When it comes to website conversion and landing page optimization, Tim Ash advocates that less is more. The president and CEO of SiteTuners.com, Tim has worked with American Express, Sony Music, Verizon Wireless, 1-800-Flowers, and others; so he knows how to improve website conversion rates by doing less. At the recent Conversion Leaders Summit, Tim provided three key pieces of advice to follow when looking at your website: (…)

We’re used to getting transaction confirmation emails like those sent by Amazon. Recently, Loren McDonald advised attendees of a Conversion Academy webinar to extend beyond the purchase to include pre-purchase, post-purchase and relationship touch points. The result? More opportunities to engage prospects and customers, something Loren’s seen firsthand as the vice president of Industry Relations at Silverpop, a leading email service provider. Here are some of the key pointers he gave in his presentation and a checklist of what to do in order to extend the transactional email activity you currently carry out. (…)

Website conversion rates are bandied about the ecommerce industry all the time, and despite many being familiar with the concept, I consistently find that a lot of people are a bit fuzzy on their website conversion and abandonment rates. This blog is intended to define the different website conversion rates and explain how to use them—and how not to. (…)

‘Have we conditioned most customers to the point that they expect discounts and won’t buy without one?’

This is a great question, and it’s worth considering in more depth. Recent research shows that coupon redemption is at an all time high, and at the same time, Ben Bernanke warns that the economic recovery is fragile and taxes will inevitably have to rise. It’s no wonder that customers are nervous and cautious. (…)

Rockler is generating spectacular results, measured in recovered revenues, from their shopping cart abandonment remarketing program.

A few months ago, Rockler Woodworking and Hardware rolled out a new email campaign to recover abandoned shopping carts and drive website conversion.

Rockler Woodworking and Hardware is the nation’s premier supplier of specialty hardware, tools, lumber, and exceptional quality woodworking products. Founded in 1954 and on the web since 1996, Rockler has become one of the top destination sites on the web and an Internet Retailer 500 site. Products are sold through catalogs, the company’s direct-to-consumer website at www.rockler.com and 30 stores.

We recently caught up with Jason Bernloehr, e-commerce manager at Rockler, to find out about their new shopping cart abandonment campaign.

Website Conversion: Why did Rockler choose to focus on shopping cart abandonment?

JB: We already knew from testing that following up on abandoned shopping carts is very effective. In fact, it had been a home run every time we tested it. (…)