And to address the issue of a followup with a potential customer, there are a few considerations to be made here. In order to be able to email a customer you need to have their email address first. I, personally, am not going to bother signing up for site unless I absolutely have to. I make use of a “guest checkout” whenever possible. So, in that scenario, you don’t have a way to get in touch with the customer.

The other issue is privacy. Some people may not WANT to be followed up with. But if you have people make this choice at some point, it’s an extra step in the signup process, which makes it that much less likely that it will be filled out. It’s certainly not a bad idea, and, unfortunately, I don’t have a solution to propose. But I do think these are important considerations to take into account when thinking about issues like this.

Full disclosure: I work for ATG (www.atg.com). We provide the number one analyst rated eCommerce platform. A good platform provides support for persistent carts and for trigger-based campaigns like sending a follow-up email with a promotion and/or contact information when a cart is abandoned.

It also provides the design flexibility to provide all the necessary information shoppers need to make up their minds before entering the purchase process.

Through our eStara division, ATG also provides Click-to-Call and Click-to-Chat services that you can add to any site. Interestingly, these are used less for generic customer service and more for maximizing conversion (as Craig indicates) by answering last minute questions when people hesitate on the checkout page.

Another great service for maximizing conversion and cart size is recommendations. Looking at a hat? How about matching gloves? Like this book? How about this one by the same author? Sometimes these recommendations turn into add-on sales and sometimes they are ways of suggesting just the right thing when what the customer is looking at now is not quite right.

Just to complete the commercial here, ATG recently acquired a company called CleverSet that provides some of the most sophisticated statistically-derived recommendations in the business.

Often people abandon online sales becasue they have one or more niggling doubts; “Is this the best deal I can get?” or “Does the product have this feature?”

(For this second sceanario, no matter how clear you descriptions are, there are always custmers who think different.)

So – put on a live chat button for people to ask questions or discuss comparisons.

Of course you have to staff the service, but you can outsource that to someone who is already proving the service to others on a per contact basis.

…anyway… ramble over…