Basically an e-commerce site has the following business objectives:

1. Maximise sales and profit
2. Be usable
3. Be useful

Best practices in e-commerce:

1. Collect email address and provide visitors with a compelling reason for giving you the information.
2. Make order tracking easy, let customers to check order status and see when they expect it to arrive.
3. Encourage feedback, make it easy for visitors to tell you what they think.
4. Make finding stuff easy and provide multiple ways for visitors to find what they are looking for, or to make a purchasing decision.
5. Provide value added services like gift wrapping, pick up in-store, pre-order soon to be available items or run a wish list.
6. Show the product providing multiple views from different angles, zoom, if applicable show the product in isolation and in context.
7. Allow customer reviews happy and not-happy customers, experts and staff.
8. Encourage user-generated content.
9. Make shipping costs transparent from the beginning this is one of the main reasons of shopping cart abandonment.
10. Work in conversion funnels and optimise the checkout process making this process as rapid and simple as possible.

Top reasons why people leave their shopping carts:

1. Shipping and handling costs
2. Not ready to shop the product
3. Wanted to compare prices on other sites
4. Item was priced too high

How to get shoppers to return:

1. Show delivery and payment options upfront and at the beginning of the checkout process
2. Offer free or reduced shipping
3. Don’t force registration before the sale has been made
4. Provide options to save content of the cart
5. Safe and secure checkout
6. Display customer support and contact info