Let people buy without an account
Guest checkout, always, with an optional “save your details” after the order is placed. Forcing registration before payment is the single most common conversion leak we see.
Show shipping costs before the last step
Surprise costs at the final screen are the top reason people abandon. Estimate shipping on the cart page, or say clearly when it is free.
Offer the wallets your customers already use
Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and, in the right markets, buy-now-pay-later. One tap beats fourteen fields every time.
Autocomplete the address
An address lookup turns six fields into one and quietly removes the typos that cause failed deliveries and refunds.
Validate inline, kindly
Tell people a field is wrong the moment they leave it, in plain language, next to the field — not in a red block at the top after they press pay.
Keep the cart visible
An order summary that stays on screen (or one tap away on mobile) reassures people they are paying for the right thing at the right price.
Make trust visible where the money is
Security badges, returns policy and a real phone number belong next to the pay button, not in the footer.
Set a speed budget and keep it
Every 100 ms of delay costs conversion. We budget the checkout to load in under two seconds on a mid-range phone on 4G and treat regressions as bugs.
Recover what you lose
Save the cart, email or message people who left, and make the link drop them straight back into a filled-in checkout.
Do not stop at “thank you”
The confirmation page is your highest-attention moment. Show delivery dates, an account prompt, and one relevant next product — not a dead end.
Measure before and after
None of this is theoretical, and none of it should be taken on faith. Instrument the funnel — cart, checkout start, payment, confirmation — before you change anything, ship changes one or two at a time, and let the numbers decide what stays. On the stores we have worked on this year, the ten changes above have been worth between eighteen and thirty per cent more completed orders from the same traffic.
The checkout is the only page on the site where every visitor has already decided to buy. Everything on it should help them finish.