Everyone does it. You’re in the middle of placing an order for something when you start to get the pre-purchase jitters. Maybe the call of Facebook is too much to resist, you open another tab and before you know it, you’ve closed out all your tabs without finishing the order. Whatever the cause is, cart abandonment is a common issue that online stores run into.

Are you content to give up on the sale? If you’re passionate about your business, you don’t want to lose a single customer. But once the cart has been abandoned, how do you draw the customer back into the sales process? How can you stop the customer from abandoning the cart in the first place? Here are five tips to consider to battle shopping cart abandonment.

When in doubt, the tried and true elements of eCommerce design represent best practices for your eCommerce store. Here are 10 tips (in two parts) for following best practices in eCommerce design.

There’s nothing more frustrating than your browser crashing in the middle of an order. Plenty of other factors could cause a customer to navigate away from the checkout page; making sure your site’s cookies save form data makes it simple for customers to pick up where they left off, consequently upping your conversion rate. When you go to the grocery store, do you pick the longest checkout line? Neither will your customers. A one-page checkout ensures that customers with slow internet connections won’t get bored waiting for pages to load, and the rest of your customers won’t lose interest or get frustrated partway through the checkout.

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics online store put the theory to the test with an A/B test that sent half of buyers to a two-page checkout and the other half to a one-pager. The single-page checkout form helped up conversion rates by 21.8 percent. If you already have a customer in your database and they abandon their cart partway through checkout, email reminders are a simple way to reignite the customer’s interest. If they ditched their cart right when the shipping fee was added, you can even send an email with a coupon code or discount. A few shopping carts on the market have built-in modules that shoot out automatic emails when a return customer abandons his or her cart, saving you a lot of time and helping with your conversion rate. With the prevalence of identity theft in the media, a little peace of mind goes a long way. To reassure customers that their personal data is safe, it’s important to post any security certificates in visible areas of the checkout process. Clearly identifying PCI-compliance, security programs like McAfee and SSL certificates shows customers that you care about their privacy and leads to a better conversion rate and less cart abandonment. Customers may have questions during the checkout process, but you don’t want to navigate them away from the checkout page. Put the resources they need right at their fingertips by placing quick links and contact information for customer support somewhere on the page. Live chat is a great feature to have operational for checkout questions. Make sure any links to FAQs or other resources pop up in a new window.