Why checkout is the most critical point in your e-commerce store
Every pound spent on advertising brings traffic to your site. Every hour invested in SEO brings organic visitors. But if checkout loses 68% of people who've already added a product to their cart, you're throwing away a large chunk of that work. Checkout is the bottleneck that determines whether everything else is worth anything.
The good news: unlike advertising or SEO, improving checkout doesn't require extra budget. It requires understanding where the user experience breaks down and fixing it. Here are the 7 problems we find in 90% of the e-commerce stores we analyse.
Mandatory account creation before purchase
34% of users abandon checkout when forced to create an account. Most people don't want another password to remember — they just want to buy. Immediate fix: add guest checkout as the primary option, with account creation offered after payment is complete.
Extra costs revealed only at the last step
48% of abandonment is caused by shipping costs, taxes or fees shown only at the end. The user had a price in mind, reaches the confirmation and finds it's gone up by 20%. Result: abandonment, and often a negative review.
Too many fields to fill in
The average checkout asks for 14-16 fields. Baymard Institute research shows the optimal checkout needs just 8. Every extra field reduces the completion rate. Billing address same as shipping? It should be pre-selected. Phone number required when it's optional? Remove it.
Too few payment methods
In 2025, offering only credit card is no longer enough. Klarna and Clearpay (BNPL) increase conversion rate by 15-25% on average order values of £80 and above. PayPal is expected by 43% of online shoppers. Apple Pay and Google Pay reduce friction on mobile to near zero.
Checkout not optimised for mobile
The majority of online purchases now happen on mobile. If your checkout doesn't trigger the numeric keyboard automatically on card fields, if buttons are too small to tap, if the layout breaks on screens under 375px — you're losing seven customers out of ten before they even start.
inputmode="numeric" to card number fields. CTA buttons at least 48px tall.No trust signals at the decisive moment
The moment a user enters their card details is the peak-anxiety moment of the purchase. SSL security badges, payment network logos, a refund guarantee and verified reviews on this page aren't decoration — they reduce abandonment by 15-22% in the tests we've run.
Generic, frustrating error messages
"Payment error. Please try again." — this message says nothing and forces the user to guess what went wrong. Expired card? Insufficient funds? Billing address mismatch? Every unexplained error is a lost customer.
How to measure improvement: the metrics to track
Before starting any optimisation, set up a checkout funnel in Google Analytics 4 with distinct steps for: cart view, checkout start, details entry, payment entry, order confirmation. Only then can you see exactly where you're losing the most users and prioritise your fixes.
The benchmarks we use as a reference: a checkout completion rate above 55% is good, above 65% is great, above 75% is excellent. The e-commerce industry average sits around 42-48%.
If you can only do one thing this week: add guest checkout. On average it generates +8-12% conversions in the first month, with zero development cost on Shopify and under an hour of work on WooCommerce.
The real case: from 1.2% to 2.27% conversion rate in 60 days
A fashion e-commerce store with £80K in monthly revenue had a 1.2% conversion rate — average for the sector, but with huge room to improve. We applied all 7 fixes over 6 weeks: guest checkout, removal of 6 unnecessary fields, added Apple Pay and a BNPL option, full mobile optimisation, redesigned trust badges, rewritten error messages.
Result after 60 days: 2.27% conversion rate. With the same traffic, +89% completed orders. Revenue went from £80K to over £150K a month — without spending an extra penny on advertising.
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