The percentage of Web users that shop online has increased year after year. As online merchants and Web sellers learn how to refine their shopping cart pages for increased conversions, we're able to identify several key components in this process to the benefit of online enterprises bottom lines - the money you end up bringing in from your marketing and advertising efforts.

1) Educate and Inform: If you are selling product online, then you have an obligation to your audience to educate, enlighten and inform them as well. The most serious and potentially damaging aspect to improving shopping cart conversion is the presence, or lack thereof, of helpful information on the products or services you are selling. The Riggs-Meyer Paradigm - an independent study of Web traffic which reveals that 70% of website visitors were researching information and only 30% were actually ready to buy - suggests that online merchants have an obligation to share not only critical information about their products and services (such as usage instructions) but also background information and general educational materials for experts and newbies alike.

2) Simplify Site Use: Developing a goal to improve conversion is essential. Online merchants notice when they design or redesign websites, strange things happen to their conversion rates - some go up and some conversion rates go down, way down. Even if a site looks professionally designed, problems always exist which can be corrected. Lower shopping cart abandonment rates means more money in your pocket at the end of the day, conduct research via polls or surveys, focus groups or interviews to determine where navigation was problematic, if graphics were poorly placed or not relevant to the mission of completing the sale, if search functions were hard to find or if they were helpful, and to what degree your shopping cart pages' call to action made a positive or negative impact.

3) Express Trustworthiness: One of the most effective ways to build trust among your visitors is to provide an effective way to address visitors' fears about the security of shopping online by revealing information about your company such as email and postal address as well as toll-free and local phone numbers, or the location of customers support forms and privacy policies. Services such as Thawte or ValidatedSite enable website owners to convey their trustworthiness of their online presence (the availability of SSL -secure socket layer - pages) and the corporation and people behind the website.