Checkout optimisation focuses on the final stage of the purchase, where customers who have already decided to buy drop off – making this the most costly loss. The most common causes are compulsory registration, unexpected delivery costs revealed only at the end, too many steps and fields, a missing preferred payment method, and insufficient information about the delivery date. The solution is checkout without registration, showing the delivery cost as early as possible, reducing the form to the essential details, pre-filling wherever possible, and a visible step progress indicator. Repeating trust elements at checkout also helps – contact details, the option to return goods, and payment security. It pays to make checkout changes one at a time and measure their impact, since this is the most sensitive part of an online store.
See also: Order process, Abandoned cart, Friction in the conversion process.
