I've learned to never say never.

Have you ever heard the term - “Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak”? Buying means making a decision, and that decision making process begins with a need to ease some pain, then logically progresses (in person) through stages of talking, thinking and actions toward closing the sale.

Online though, there are no body clues – no sales representative to nod their head up and down, looking for a yes response, cueing the prospect to follow suit. Online, compelling landing & checkout pages are vital to your success.

Buying anything is an emotional process – for some much more so than others, like me. Using the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell to evoke an emotion (tied to your offer) helps reinforce your solution in the eyes of your prospect.

Closing the sale – isn’t simply a yes or a no. It’s a logical progression from a search query to the point “Add to Cart. “ The term, “Always Be Closing,” applies to each and every page the prospect touches until the order is completed, and really should continue beyond that, with either a survey or recommendations for other products and services based on what they just purchased.

Giving your prospect too many choices – or making the navigation from Point “Search” to Point “Buy’ difficult, is just as bad.

Navigation is probably the biggest killer that I've seen. Between navigation on the websites and then the checkout navigation (or worse, not being able to find the checkout button). I've been to a number of sites that have made just the checkout process alone so complicated that I've left the site and purchased the same product elsewhere.

The nice thing about the web (and also most merchants downfall) is that there's many companies selling the same type of product online. If you don't wow them on your site and compel them to buy, then they will go elsewhere.

Too many choices is probably the biggest failure in many of the places I've visited.

Checkout navigation is huge. Shopping cart abandonment has reached 75%, with over 40% saying the checkout process was too long and over 25% saying the process was too confusing.

This can vary depending on who is running the survey, but those numbers are reflected on a huge number of sites doing a search query of "shopping cart abandonment percentages."

Must agree, if I can't find it in seconds, then catch you later I ain't bothering!

I even once had to chase a company myself, to actually buy something, I am sure it works the other way

I was recently helping a friend with his hosting site, and he had a text ad across the top for a shared hosting special.
Problem was, there was no links from his homepage to his shared hosting page! (He specialized in leasing servers so shared was not his priority.) Took me 4 minutes to track it down.