Once upon a time, every company or business decision was just a big idea, nothing but a concept somewhere in someone's head. Usually, these big ideas strike like lightening - without warning. It's exciting to think of something new, and I'm always eager to implement it as quickly as possible for the benefit of my business.

I'm all about the flowchart, as it provides a way for my company to visualize our future plans. It doesn't take me long to scribble my ideas on a piece of paper with lines and circles. Making changes requires erasing and redoing, and it's pretty easy to get frustrated. Time is money, and there's got to be a better way to get your ideas across then a bunch of messy notes on a whiteboard. You want an impressive, professional looking map of your brilliant plans to correctly convey to your coworkers or clients. There are plenty of advanced programs to help you create complex diagrams, but they're usually pretty expensive.

Smooth Flowcharter (SFM) is a program that allows you to create webs and flow charts quickly for a fair price. SMF allows you to use both words and drawings to communicate information to your clients and coworkers. The program has a very self-explanatory design, so you don't even have to read the manual in order to get started. It's easy to drag shapes from the object palette and place them in your document. Once you've added at least two objects, you can begin to connect them, dragging lines from one object to the other.

When you first open SFM, you'll see the menu area, the palette, the overview window, and a new document. To start, pick an object from the palette on the left and drag it into your document. By clicking on the text inside the object, you are able to edit it. You can enlarge the object by clicking on it and then selecting one of the green points that appears. Simply click and hold onto the point, dragging it to either make the object smaller or larger. When you hold your mouse over an object, port indicators will appear. A port is the section of the object that allows you to either initiate or terminate a link. Just click and drag from one object to another. When your mouse is no longer hovering over an object, the port will hide automatically.

Now that you know how to easily create an organized flow chart, you can finally bring your ideas to life with the confidence that comes from having a professional plan.

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Imagine you walk into a department store to pick up a gift for a friend's birthday. You've got places to be, so you're looking for this to be a quick run to the mall. You get to the store, and you easily find two gifts that are perfect for your friend. You're ready to get out of there, but the line of 20 people in front of you comes between you and your quick exit. While you're waiting in a seemingly endless line, you decide that you probably don't need to get your friend two things when one would be just fine, and down goes the first gift. Once you finally reach the cashier, the credit card reader appears to be broken. After four swipes of your card and a hasty panic that you've been charged four times, you decide to just give up and leave the store empty-handed. You decide that you'll just try again tomorrow.

In the world of e-commerce, a scenario like this is all too common. For online businesses, shopping cart abandonment is a serious concern and can often mark the difference between profitability and loss. On a daily basis, customers visit online shopping websites, initiate the checkout process, and leave before actually completing it for any number of reasons; some of these include:

* checkout requires too much personal information

* checkout is too long

* changed mind

* site requires registration before purchase

* site is unstable or unreliable

* high shipping prices

* long delivery times

* checkout process is confusing



Be mindful of these reasons and take another look at your website. Are there any changes that you know that you can make? A good place to start would be taking a look at these four helpful tips:

* Know your abandon rate

o If you have an extremely low abandon rate percentage, it's not always a good thing. If your abandon rate is any percentage less than 50%, you've got a bigger problem. Most likely your customers are having issues with cart adoption, meaning that there aren't enough customers adding items to their carts. If customers aren't even adding items to their carts, it can be as much of a problem, if not more, than customers adding to their carts and taking off before checkout.

* Determine when shoppers are abandoning their carts and why

o It's very important to know when exactly shoppers are leaving their carts. The further they get in the process towards the checkout line, the less likely it is for them to leave. Are they leaving towards the beginning of the process? Maybe they're getting frustrated waiting for items to be added or pages to load. Does your "Review Your Purchase" page look too much like a confirmation page? Maybe they think they've made their purchase too soon. Are they leaving as soon as they hit the payment page? Maybe you need to look into increasing the number of payment options that you offer. You have to find out where your users are getting frustrated, and you can do this with time trials, server calls or restates.

* One page or multi-page checkout?

o Many companies are ditching their old, multi-page checkouts and switching to a checkout that is just one page. Ideally, having both would be the best bet. For guest shoppers and users who aren't quite computer saavy, the different pages with billing information, payment information, and review and confirmation of the order are great for making the process less overwhelming. For returning customers, a one-page, one step checkout is preferable. It's important to offer each user the checkout format that they are most likely to complete. You have to think about what's right for your customers.

* Offer a guest checkout

o If you feature a guest checkout, it's likely that up to a quarter of your customers will choose it. The main reasons for this have to do with passwords and speed.

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