The Checkout Autopsy: 12 Friction Points Costing You 20% Revenue
A field-tested audit checklist we run before every ecommerce engagement.
Checkout is where intent goes to die quietly. The failures are rarely dramatic; they are small hesitations that accumulate into abandonment, and almost all of them are visible in a careful walkthrough on a mid-range phone with a slow connection.
01The recurring twelve
These issues appear in the majority of audits we run:
- Total cost, including shipping and tax, revealed only at the final step
- Forced account creation before payment
- Address forms that reject valid international formats
- No visible progress indicator across steps
- Payment methods the market actually prefers are missing
- Discount field that draws attention away from completion
- Errors reported after submission instead of inline
- Slow third-party scripts blocking the payment button
- No order summary visible while entering payment details
- Trust signals absent at the moment of payment
- Mobile keyboards that do not match the field type
- No recovery path after a declined card
02Fix order matters
Sequence by expected revenue impact divided by build effort. Cost transparency and inline validation usually top that list; visual polish rarely does.
Re-run the walkthrough after each release. Checkout regressions ship silently more often than any other part of a storefront.
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