Plenty of ecommerce owners obsess over ads, email flows and product photography while their checkout quietly bleeds money in the background. It is not unusual to see a store spending €4,000 to €12,000 a month on traffic, only to send shoppers into a checkout that asks too many questions, shows surprise costs too late, or simply feels awkward on a phone. That is not a marketing issue. It is self-inflicted friction.
If you run an online shop, checkout is not an admin detail to tidy up later. It is the point where money either changes hands or disappears. A store can survive an average category page or slightly weak copy for a while, but a clumsy checkout will punish every campaign, every promotion and every product launch. You end up paying more for the same customer because too many people drop off after doing the hard part: deciding to buy.
The blunt version is this: if your checkout is making customers stop, think, search, recalculate or second-guess, it is costing you sales. And unlike vague brand complaints, checkout problems are measurable. You can see them in abandonment rates, mobile drop-off, payment failures and support emails asking basic questions that should never need asking.
Checkout is where most ecommerce stores waste the money they spend on traffic
A lot of owners talk about conversion rate as if it is one single number. It is not. Someone landing on a product page and someone completing a payment are two very different moments. You can have healthy add-to-cart rates and still have a weak business because your checkout takes too much effort. In practical terms, that means you are paying Google, Meta or marketplaces to send people most of the way to the till, then giving them a reason to leave.
For many small and mid-sized stores, cart abandonment sits somewhere between 60% and 80%. Some of that is normal. People compare prices, get distracted, or save items for later. But when your checkout abandonment is unusually high, especially on mobile, it usually comes down to avoidable friction: forced account creation, hidden delivery costs, too many form fields, poor trust signals or payment options that do not match how people actually want to pay.
Think about the maths. If your store gets 20,000 monthly visits, converts 2.2% of them into orders and has an average order value of €68, you are doing roughly €29,920 a month in revenue. If a cleaner checkout nudges conversion from 2.2% to 2.8%, that becomes €38,080. That is an extra €8,160 a month without increasing traffic. Over a year, that is just under €98,000. Suddenly, spending time and budget on checkout stops looking like a minor optimisation and starts looking like basic commercial sense.
If customers need to think during checkout, you have already made it harder than it should be
Good checkout design is boring in the best possible way. It does not force the customer to interpret labels, guess delivery times, hunt for card details on a tiny screen or decide whether they should create an account before paying. The customer should feel like they are moving downhill. Every extra decision is a small tax on intent, and those taxes add up fast.
One of the most common mistakes is asking for information you do not need. If you sell physical products, you need delivery details and payment. That is obvious. You may need billing details if they differ. Beyond that, be careful. Date of birth, company name, "how did you hear about us?", separate title fields, optional account setup before payment, and multiple marketing preferences all add friction. Even adding four unnecessary fields can be enough to dent completion rates, especially on mobile where typing is slower and patience is thinner.
Another common issue is making the customer do mental arithmetic. If product pages say one thing, the basket says another, and delivery charges appear late in the process, people feel tricked even if you did not intend it that way. The same goes for unclear returns, vague dispatch times and discount code boxes that encourage shoppers to leave and look for coupons. If the checkout creates doubt, people pause. When people pause, a good percentage never come back.
The quickest wins are usually obvious, and most stores still ignore them
There are a few checkout fixes that repeatedly make a noticeable difference, yet many stores still avoid them because they seem too simple. Guest checkout is the first. If someone wants your product, do not make them start a relationship before they have even paid. Let them buy first. You can always invite them to create an account after purchase, when the hard part is done.
Show full costs early is the second. Delivery charges, taxes and estimated arrival dates should not appear as a nasty surprise in the final step. If your average delivery fee is €6.95, say that clearly in the basket or even on the product page. People are not angry because shipping exists; they are annoyed when they only learn about it after committing time and attention.
Offer payment methods people actually trust is the third. Card payments matter, obviously, but depending on your market, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna or Revolut Pay can remove effort and improve completion on phones. For some stores, express payment options reduce checkout time from two minutes to under 30 seconds. That matters more than owners realise. A customer buying from an Instagram ad on a train is not in the mood for a 14-field form.
- Use guest checkout by default, with account creation offered after purchase
- Keep forms short and remove anything not essential to fulfil the order
- Show delivery cost and timing early, not at the final payment step
- Support mobile wallets for faster payment on phones
- Make errors obvious and fixable, especially postcode and card issues
- Display trust clearly with returns info, contact details and secure payment messaging
A practical example: one checkout rebuild cut abandonment by 31 points
A Dublin-based home and gift retailer came to RedStudio after spending heavily on seasonal campaigns with disappointing returns. Their traffic was decent at around 32,000 visits a month, and product pages were performing reasonably well, but checkout abandonment was sitting at 72%. Mobile was worse again. The owner assumed the issue was ad quality or pricing pressure from competitors, but the bigger problem was the buying process itself.
The checkout had forced account creation, only accepted card and PayPal, revealed a €7.50 delivery charge late in the process, and split the journey into too many steps. On top of that, the coupon code field was prominent, which encouraged shoppers to leave and search for discounts. We simplified the flow to guest-first checkout, moved delivery information into the basket, added Apple Pay and Google Pay, reduced form fields by roughly 35%, and made returns information visible beside the order summary rather than hidden in the footer.
Within eight weeks, checkout abandonment dropped from 72% to 41%. Mobile conversion increased from 1.1% to 2.3%, and overall revenue rose by 26% without increasing ad spend. The project was not flashy. It did not involve a dramatic rebrand or expensive custom features. It was simply a matter of removing friction at the point where customers were trying to pay. That is often where the best ecommerce gains come from: not more complexity, just less nonsense.
Do not confuse fancy checkout features with a better checkout
Some ecommerce teams make the mistake of treating checkout like a place to showcase features. Progress bars, upsells, loyalty prompts, newsletter opt-ins, gift wrap add-ons, promo boxes, referral messages and cross-sells all compete for attention. A few of these can work in the right context, but too many turn the final buying step into a negotiation. That is the opposite of what checkout is for.
If your average order value is healthy and your margins are tight, you may be tempted to squeeze more out of the basket with add-ons. Fair enough. But be honest about the trade-off. A checkout that increases average order value by 4% while reducing completion by 12% is not clever. It is expensive. Revenue is not just about basket size; it is about how many people finish the purchase in the first place.
This is why opinion matters here. My view is simple: checkout should prioritise completion over persuasion. Product pages and basket pages can do more selling. Checkout should remove doubt, not introduce more reasons to think. If someone is ready to pay, your job is to make that easy, fast and trustworthy.
What to check this week if you suspect your checkout is underperforming
You do not need a six-month strategy deck to spot most checkout problems. Start by looking at your analytics properly. Separate desktop from mobile. Look at basket-to-checkout rate, checkout completion rate, payment failure rate and where people drop off. If mobile conversion is half of desktop, that is a clue. If a large percentage exit when delivery is shown, that is another. If your support team keeps answering the same pre-purchase questions, your checkout is not clear enough.
Then do something unfashionable: buy from your own store on your own phone. Do it on 4G, not office Wi-Fi. Try it with one hand while distracted. Use a new customer email address. Time how long it takes from basket to payment. If you get annoyed, confused or delayed, your customers are feeling the same thing. Owners often discover obvious issues this way that months of internal discussion somehow missed.
Finally, prioritise fixes by commercial impact, not internal preference. Start with guest checkout, visible delivery costs, fewer fields, stronger mobile payment options and clearer trust signals. Measure before and after. You do not need to rebuild everything to improve results. But you do need to stop treating checkout as the final box to tick. The practical takeaway is simple: if people are reaching your basket but not paying, stop buying more traffic and fix the last 5% of the journey first. That is where a lot of ecommerce profit is won or lost.