(You can read the first part of Best Practices in Shopping Cart Design here)
Too much candy can distract the eye
When planning the overall design or theme of your site try to keep things somewhat low key, too much eye candy will pull your visitors attention away from the actual products you are promoting. Try to avoid extensive use of flash animations, JavaScript effects, video and sound. A simple header logo along with graphics introducing special offers or discounts should be plenty for the actual store front. The only place the on-line shopping cart can be graphics heavy is within the actual product information pages, here the rule of thumb is the more pictures the better. If your store visitor spends time looking at a good selection of images for a product then they are being forced to concentrate upon it, a single picture can be viewed and dismissed in a split second. Add an image gallery for the product, with suitable image navigation and your customer is effectively locked into that product for the time they spend browsing the images.
Here is an example of an on-line store which uses a simple theme which does not cause the visitor to lose focus on the products:
