There’s no silver bullet for reducing shopping cart abandonment. As a result, online marketers who attack the issue from many angles yield the best results.

One angle no ecommerce company should miss: Optimizing the cart to make sure your visitors can correct order mistakes, and get the help they need, so they don’t jump ship before the all-important conversion.

1. Let them double-check their order.

Unlike in a brick-and-mortar store, online shoppers can easily “misclick” an item, adding the wrong color or size to their shopping cart. So on checkout pages, try creating a lightbox or overlay to reassure visitors that they’ve made the right selection. When the visitor clicks on a product in their cart, the resulting lightbox can display pertinent specs, from color to size to descriptive text, and allow people to make changes to the item. Unlike relying on the “Back” button, which will have shoppers navigating away from where you want them to be, a pop-up allows people to review their selection without leaving the shopping cart environment.

2. Give them a way to get in touch now.

When are visitors’ tempers most likely to flare? During checkout. Once consumers encounter an error message or can’t find the answer to one of their questions, they’re far less interested in conducting business with a machine. Let visitors know you’re a real company by providing full contact information and a dedicated, toll-free line (for tracking purposes) for visitors who aren’t comfortable using a credit card online.

This is also a smart place to trigger a “live chat” session—like those offered via www.liveperson.com or www.olark.com—letting consumers know a real person is available to answer questions.  Often this can be triggered after a defined period of time, or if the cart value is above a specific amount, limiting the additional cost of incremental chats when they may not be necessary.

For more tactics proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment, download The Ultimate Guide to Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment eBook.