Ecommerce Sales - Stop Customers from Abandoning Your Shopping Cart

Sales tax is not an exciting topic. The science of abandoned shopping carts is not the stuff of hip social media buzz. But making life easier for your customers and increasing your sales success is the purpose of this post. My goal is to share a diverse range of ecommerce resources to help you figure out and streamline your customer's shopping experience.If you spend time in your website analytics, you'll see where and how your customer ends a visit. You can customize Google Analytics, but it isn't easy. You often need a consultant to help configure it all. But with a little time, I've figured out how to get basic and advanced reports and so can you.  But without asking for feedback, you'll be guessing at the exact reason why a customer left. So, I recommend you use a tool like KISSinsights to survey customers while they are on your site, or when they try to click out. You can pop up a survey at that moment that says something like, "We're sorry you decided to leave, please share any feedback with us as to what happened so we can improve your shopping experience with us..."  Hat tip to BigCommerce which offers a wide range of ecommerce webinars to help merchants, including enhancing analytics and reducing cart abandonment.If they don't abandon your cart before they click buy, congratulations. But you're not out of the woods, yet. I found this short two minute video and blog post on ways an Internet Sales Tax will impact your business. In it, Volusion expert, Matt Winn explains, "There are over 7500 individual tax jurisdictions in the United States alone, each of which with their own exemptions and rules. This makes it impossible to keep up with these differences on your own, hence the need for a piece of software to automate it for you."  The big "aha" for me is how do you compete on price when you often have to offer free shipping (to keep up with Amazon) and now you'll ask your customer to pay sales tax.I also found this great (free) whitepaper about Simplifying Sales Tax for E-Commerce Merchants from Avalara (a web-based provider that offers a sales tax solution to integrate with your ecommerce provider).  This paper goes over many of the hassles of collecting sales tax and how merchants are responsible for it.  It seems to me that keeping up with all the different tax requirements would be a nightmare, if I ran an online store selling in different states and countries.And, if you are still hunting for an ecommerce solution, then you'll want to peruse my meta-list at SmallBizTrends with 68 Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Solutions for Small Business Owners. It has been shared and bookmarked many times.* * * * *TJ McCue runs TechBizTalk, a site to help business owners find useful and profitable apps.