Shopping Cart help needed.

Ok we have a 3 step shopping cart. What I mean is that there are 3 pages from beginning to end.

What I have noticed is that getting people to go from the first page to the second page drops significantly (greater than 50% on some instances)

However when they get to the second page, the percentage that went to the first step, about 70% of them go to step 3 which is the confirmation of purchase.

My question is;

Would it be advisable to have only 2 shopping cart pages in comparison to 3?

This way there would only be one page to fill out info on and then page 2 woud be the purchase confirmation?

Thanks

Your post is kinda vague. What's important is what does each page do and why?

If I had to guess your pages go

1. Cart summary
2. Billing/Shipping entry
3. Order confirmation

If so there's not much you can do. Lots of people add items to a cart but fail to convert to a sale. It has nothing to do with how many pages you have. If I proceed to a page where billing info is entered I'm pretty likely to make a purchase at that point.

I personally find carts with too few pages (or poorly designed interfaces) to be places where I don't want to check out (even if there's SSL).

Sorry about being vauge.

1) Billing info
2) Card number
3) Order confirmation

We do not use add to cart, we have buy now images spread throughout the site and it takes visitor to step one. Add cart would not work in our website as we are the manufacturer of 5 or so specific products, that being said the average visitor only intends on buying 1 product.

I know that people will drop, but i kind of thought it was a weird percentage that drops from step one to step 2.

Just trying to think of ways that are outside of the box.

Is that the general concensus, too few cart pages= turn off?

I still think we're missing information.

Do any of the steps requre the user to "create an account" of some sort to continue? --We find that a LOT of customers don't like creating accounts for what may be simple/1-off/1-time orders (as it sounds like your site may be focused towards)

Are you looking at the results by hits or visitors? Being as you have no intermediary "cart/bag" page, I would expect the number of hits to 1 to be much greater than to 2... This number should be flatter when looking at visitors...

Its called abandonment.
A roll of an seo is to bring in the traffic.
The next step is to get the conversions up.
You have answered your own question in your frist set of questions.

If you think you are having problems with 3 pages try 2 and see if your conversions go up and if there is less abandonment.

If that dosent work you can isolate another problem and work on that but you will have answered the two pages instead of three and either solved the problem or ruled more factors out.