In their recent e-commerce report, MarketingSherpa pointed out that the fastest way to increase your conversion rate is to fix your shopping cart. Here are 10 ways to change your cart and increase conversions:

1. Make sure that your cart allows visitors to shop without registering. Sure, it’s nice to get the registration, but wouldn’t you rather get the order? Lots of people will register after they order, but don’t slow down the sale.
2. If you do want to get registrations, give people a reason why they should bother. For example, you could keep track of what registered visitors purchase and tell them what supplies they need.
3. Make sure your shopping cart accepts a discount or coupon code so that you can have a promotion, accept gift certificates or just offer a financial “thank you” to an important customer.
4. Reassure people at the right time.  The visitor gets to the shopping cart and has doubts. Are they going to use my email address to send me lots of spam, he wonders? (So, link to your privacy policy right there.) Is my order secure, she wonders? (So, show off your Hacker Free icon or other similar “protection chicklet.”)
5. Show a summary of what the visitor is buying on every screen of the shopping cart. When someone is shopping quickly, comparing pricing and comparing products at the same time, there is nothing more infuriating than the requirement to type in a credit card without being 100% sure what product is in the cart.
6. Speaking of every screen, try to get your shopping cart down to one screen. Clicks are precious – every time someone clicks is another opportunity for them to reconsider the purchase.
7. If your cart needs to include both a bill-to and ship-to address, be sure that the customer can check a box after the bill-to information is done to indicate that the ship-to information is identical. At that point, your system should auto-complete the ship-to information. (Or, you could have the option of only showing the ship-to fields when the customer tells you that the product is shipping to an address that differs from the billing address.)
8. Don’t force the customer to enter information in a specific format. This is usually a problem in the telephone number field and in the credit card number field, where the shopping cart doesn’t want dashes or dots. In fact, when the customer uses dashes (or dots) it becomes much easier for him to enter the information correctly
9. Your customer service phone number should be in your shopping cart so that people can call with questions and problems.  If your company isn’t big enough to support a full-time customer service staff, you can discourage too many calls by including a phone number that is not toll-free, having your voicemail pick up the call during non-business hours (a lousy solution but better than none) and including your email address. Any contact information is better than no contact information at all.
10.  Don’t include your persistent navigation (top navigation, left navigation bar) in the shopping cart – instead, you need to have your branding without navigation. You want to close the sale. (You have to balance this advice with opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell.)
11. Bonus: On the “Thank you for your order” page, suggest to customers that they go back to your site and purchase all the items that they forgot the first time.