Checkout abandonment gets blamed on price or indecision more often than it should be. A real share of lost sales come from friction in the checkout itself — friction that’s often invisible to the people who built it, because they’re not experiencing it as a first-time buyer.
Forcing account creation before purchase
Every extra required field between “I want this” and “I’ve bought it” is a chance for someone to reconsider. A guest checkout option, with account creation offered afterward, consistently converts better than forcing it upfront.
Hiding the total cost until the last step
Shipping costs or fees that only appear at the final step, after a shopper has already invested time filling out the form, is one of the most reliable ways to lose a sale that was otherwise ready to happen.
Too many steps, or steps that feel pointless
A checkout that takes five screens to do what could reasonably be two isn’t more thorough — it’s more opportunities to abandon. Every field should earn its place by being genuinely necessary to complete the order.
Slow payment processing
A checkout that hangs for several seconds after “place order” creates doubt about whether it worked, and doubt at that exact moment is expensive. This is as much a performance problem as a UX one — and it’s usually fixable.
The fix is usually testing it yourself
Most of these problems are invisible from the admin side and glaring from the customer side. Actually running through your own checkout as a first-time buyer, on a phone, with a slow connection, surfaces most of this without needing analytics at all.