The art of running an e-commerce store is a logistical challenge. Between keeping products in stock and listing them properly, to ensuring that your marketing strategies are working and that your competition hasn’t gained the upper hand, you no doubt may miss a thing or two every now and then. We are all aware of the issues that can arise between adding an item to a cart and finalizing the purchase, but some issues may be caused by your actions (or inactions) in various areas. We’ve put together a list of items that you’ll want to implement or correct ASAP in order to ensure that your checkout numbers are as good as they can be.

Cart Dumping

The best e-commerce sites out there have persistent cookie technology that ensures all items added to a cart by a shopper will stay there until they make the purchase or clean out their cookies. When a store purges a shopper’s cart of the items they added between visits, this can lead to a reduction in items ultimately purchased. Roughly one-third of shoppers admit to abandoning their shopping cart because they weren’t ready to purchase at that time, but they ultimately come back to do so. If your customers are pinging servers on your site upon return and do not find their previously-added items, then they may forget about select items they originally planned to purchase. Be sure to implement this technology and allow users to permanently store their items in a cart until they’re ready to purchase.

Requiring an Account

Think about account creation from your own experiences. You are asked to create an account everywhere you go and for just about anything you wish to do. This often seems redundant, and especially when you only want to browse and see the total cost before committing. The use of guest checkout options on e-commerce sites can boost business by eliminating an additional step between the shopper’s impulse and final purchase. While you may not be able to collect as much information from the shopper or subscribe them to a mailing list, not offering a guest checkout option will undoubtedly hurt your checkout numbers over the long-term. Unfortunately for many, they never realize this because it is hard to miss a sale that you never saw in the first place.

Forms Incompatible with Mobile

If your e-commerce store is not perfectly compatible with mobile devices, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. An increasing number of purchases are now made from mobile devices, and sites that are pinging servers with lousy checkout forms that cannot be adequately filled out on a mobile device will no doubt fail to convert. You can correct this problem by ensuring that both your e-commerce site and checkout solutions are using mobile responsive themes and templates. Making this even worse is the fact that accommodating mobile devices is very easy. With more than one-third of all internet traffic now originating through mobile devices, you simply cannot afford to lose checkout opportunities because your site doesn’t accommodate them.