You pay to bring traffic in. Your product pages convince. The customer adds to cart. Then, in the home stretch, they vanish. That's not an exception, it's the norm: the Baymard Institute's long-running reviews place average cart abandonment around 70%. Roughly 7 carts out of 10 never become orders. And unlike traffic, which gets more expensive every year, recovering a fraction of those carts costs nothing but well-aimed work. The checkout is where a dollar of optimization returns the most, because it acts on people who already wanted to buy. Here are the frictions we find in almost every store audit, ranked by damage.
1. Surprise fees, killer number one
The most documented cause of abandonment isn't technical: it's extra costs discovered too late. Shipping, taxes, miscellaneous fees appearing at the last step.
The fix isn't hiding fees, it's announcing them early: free-shipping threshold shown from the cart, visible tax estimate, no fee appearing for the first time at payment. A customer who knows the total before checkout can't be surprised by it.
2. Forced account creation
Requiring an account before purchase means asking for commitment before the transaction. Guest checkout must exist, be visible, and come first. Account creation gets offered after the order, when the customer has already said yes, with a real reason (tracking, one-click reorder).
3. Mobile slowness
The majority of ecommerce traffic is mobile, and every second of load time at checkout is paid in abandonment. The usual suspects: stacked third-party scripts (pixels, chats, review widgets), unoptimized images, Shopify apps accumulated over three years half of which no longer serve anything. On our mandates we target mobile performance scores of 85 and up; not for the score, for the seconds.
4. Missing digital wallets
Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay: each replaces two minutes of forms with a fingerprint. Every missing wallet forces part of your customers to type 16 card digits on a phone keyboard. It's often the fastest configuration on this whole list, and one of the most profitable.
5. The form that asks too much
Every field is a step. The questions to ask field by field: is it necessary to deliver the order? Can the postal code pre-fill the city? Is the phone number really mandatory? Is address autocomplete on? A checkout form is judged by the number of gestures, not by the amount of information it would like to collect.
6. Trust, at the exact moment of doubt
The moment the customer pulls out their card is the moment their doubts resurface. That's where reassurance signals must live: a one-sentence return policy, a precise delivery window, a secure-payment badge, and a visible way to reach you. Not a wall of logos: a short answer to each fear.
7. Upsells that sabotage
Additional offers at checkout work, on one condition: they must not interrupt. A discreet complementary offer in the cart raises average order value. A popup between the customer and the pay button mostly raises abandonment. The rule: never an extra step between intent and payment.
The method: measure before touching
Checkout CRO isn't a list of best practices to apply blindly, it's a diagnosis. The order of operations on our mandates:
- Install the measurement funnel: cart → checkout started → payment → confirmation, with the pass-through rate of each step.
- Identify the most broken step. One abnormal drop between two specific steps beats ten intuitions.
- Fix one thing at a time and measure for two weeks. Simultaneous fixes make the result unreadable.
- Repeat. CRO is a cycle, not a project.
FAQ
What is a good conversion rate for an online store? It varies enormously by industry, average order value and traffic source. The most useful number isn't the industry average, it's your own rate from three months ago. Beat that.
Can you modify the checkout on Shopify? Standard Shopify merchants control the cart, express payment options, fields and everything around the checkout; the payment page itself is locked (except on Shopify Plus). The good news: most frictions on this list get fixed before the payment page.
Promo codes at checkout: good or bad idea? A prominent promo field sends part of your customers to Google hunting for a code, and some never come back. Keep the field discreet, or apply promotions automatically.
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