Checkout flow optimization is one of the highest-leverage things you can do in e-commerce — and yet most stores leave it almost entirely untouched. At Choco Media, when we audit a client’s store, we rarely need to look further than the checkout to find where revenue is quietly disappearing. The friction is almost always hiding in plain sight: six recurring patterns that show up again and again regardless of platform, product, or price point.
This post is for anyone running an online store — Shopify, WooCommerce, whatever — who knows their traffic is decent but conversion feels lower than it should be. We’ll walk through each friction point with specific things to look at and specific things to change. No CRO theory, no benchmarks that don’t apply to your context. Just the patterns we’ve seen reduce checkout abandonment in real accounts.
A quick note on scope: we’re talking about the checkout itself — from the moment a user clicks “buy” or “add to cart” through to order confirmation. Cart page optimisation is a related but separate topic. These are the six steps inside the checkout where most stores lose the most people.
1. The Forced Account Barrier
If your checkout requires account creation before purchase, you’re filtering out a significant share of otherwise willing buyers. This is the single most well-documented checkout friction point in e-commerce, and it still trips up stores every year — usually because it was set as the default during setup and nobody thought to question it.
The fix is straightforward: offer guest checkout as the primary path, and make account creation an optional step after the purchase confirmation. Most platforms support this natively. On Shopify, it’s a single toggle in checkout settings. On WooCommerce, it’s a checkbox in the checkout options.
- Lead with “Continue as guest” — not “Create account” or “Sign in”
- Move the “save your details for next time” prompt to the order confirmation page
- If you do show a login option, make it clearly secondary — smaller, lower on the page
- Test the guest path yourself, end to end, every quarter
In client work we’ve found that even stores with returning customer rates above 30% see checkout conversion improve when guest checkout is foregrounded. Returning customers who want to log in will find the option. New customers shouldn’t have to step over it.
One edge case worth noting
Subscription products are an exception — account creation is often necessary for managing subscriptions. In those cases, set the expectation early (on the product page or in the cart) so the checkout requirement doesn’t feel like a surprise.
2. Form Fields You Don’t Actually Need
Every additional field in a checkout form is a micro-decision that costs the user cognitive effort. Most stores ask for more than they need — a second address line that could be optional, a phone number field marked required when it’s only used for delivery notifications, a company name field shown to all users even when most are buying personally.
The principle here is simple: only collect what you need to complete the transaction and fulfil the order. Everything else is friction.
- Audit every field: is this required for the order, or just for a system preference?
- Make truly optional fields optional and label them as such
- Hide fields that only apply to some users (company name, VAT number) behind a toggle or conditional logic
- Consider removing the “Address Line 2” label and replacing it with a subtle “Apartment, suite, etc. (optional)” placeholder
Address autocomplete is also worth implementing if you haven’t already. Google Places API integration is available on most platforms and meaningfully reduces the effort of filling in address fields — users type 3-4 characters and confirm rather than typing every field manually.
“The best checkout form is the one the user barely notices. Every field that earns its place is invisible; every field that doesn’t is a reason to leave.”
3. Unexpected Costs at the Final Step
Checkout abandonment spikes when the total on the order summary page is meaningfully higher than what the user expected. Shipping costs are the most common culprit, but VAT display (especially for B2C stores in VAT-inclusive markets like Finland), currency conversion fees, and handling charges all cause the same effect: the user feels surprised, and surprise at this stage feels like being misled.
The goal isn’t to hide costs — it’s to surface them before the user reaches checkout so the final total is a confirmation rather than a revelation.
- Show shipping costs (or a shipping calculator) on the product page and cart
- If free shipping is available above a threshold, show the threshold prominently in the cart
- Display taxes in a way that matches how your market expects to see prices — VAT-inclusive pricing for EU B2C, clear tax-added display for B2B
- Avoid introducing any new line items on the checkout page that weren’t visible at cart stage
If your shipping costs are genuinely high relative to order value (common in low-AOV stores or when shipping bulky products), consider whether a flat-rate or free-shipping-above-threshold model would recover more in conversion than you’d lose in margin. In many cases it does.
4. Trust Signal Absence at the Payment Step
The moment a user is about to enter their card details is the moment they are most primed to reconsider. This is where trust signals matter most — and where many stores either display them inconsistently or rely on generic elements that don’t do much work.
Trust signals at checkout fall into two categories: security signals (this transaction is safe) and social signals (other people have bought here and been happy). Both are useful. Security signals are table stakes; social signals are often under-deployed.
- Show payment security badges near the payment fields — not just in the footer
- Display accepted payment methods visually before the user reaches the payment step
- Include a short, specific returns/refund policy summary near the CTA button — not just a link to the full policy page
- If you have review data, a single recent review or star rating near the payment button can meaningfully reduce abandonment
- Show order total clearly above the CTA — users want to confirm before they click
For stores using our conversion rate optimisation service, this is one of the first areas we instrument — session replay at the payment step often reveals hesitation patterns (repeated scrolling, mouse movements toward the back button) that indicate where specific trust signals are missing.
Payment method coverage
In Finnish and Nordic markets, local payment methods matter. If you’re selling to Finnish consumers and not offering Finnish bank payments (MobilePay, Paytrail, bank buttons), you’re likely losing a material share of transactions that would otherwise complete. This isn’t a checkout UX issue per se — it’s a payment infrastructure decision — but the conversion impact is just as direct.
5. Mobile Checkout That Was Designed on Desktop
In most e-commerce stores, more than half of sessions happen on mobile — but checkout flows are often designed and tested primarily on desktop. The result is a mobile checkout that technically works but is full of small frictions: tap targets that are too small, keyboard types that don’t match the input (numeric keyboard not triggered for phone number fields), multi-column layouts that become confusing in a single column, and progress indicators that are cut off on smaller screens.
A mobile checkout audit should cover at minimum:
- Tap target size — buttons and inputs should be at least 44px tall; smaller than that and mis-taps add friction
- Input types — email fields should trigger the email keyboard, phone fields the numeric keyboard, postal code fields a numeric or alphanumeric keyboard depending on market
- Autofill support — are your fields correctly named so that mobile autofill (saved addresses, Apple Pay, Google Pay) can populate them?
- CTA visibility — on mobile, the primary CTA button should be visible without scrolling from every checkout step; sticky CTA bars are worth testing
- Error message placement — errors that appear at the top of a long form are easy to miss on mobile; inline validation is more effective
Apple Pay and Google Pay are worth special mention. For mobile users who have them set up, they collapse the entire payment step into a single tap — removing address entry, card entry, and the majority of checkout friction in one move. If you’re not offering them, enabling them is one of the higher-return technical investments in checkout optimization.
6. The One-Page vs Multi-Step Decision Made Badly
One-page checkout and multi-step checkout each have genuine advantages, and the conversion difference between them depends heavily on context — product type, average order value, amount of information required. What we see in practice is that many stores are using one format or the other for no deliberate reason: it was the default, or someone changed it years ago and nobody knows why.
The relevant question isn’t “which format converts better in general?” — it’s “which format reduces confusion and perceived effort for our specific customer completing our specific checkout?”
- Multi-step tends to work better for longer checkouts (subscription products, customisation options, multiple delivery choices) because it breaks the process into manageable pieces and shows clear progress
- One-page tends to work better for simple checkouts (single product, minimal fields, fast purchase intent) because it removes the sense of an unknown number of steps
- Progress indicators matter more in multi-step — users need to know where they are and how many steps remain
- Back button behaviour matters in both — users should be able to return to a previous step without losing their data
If you haven’t deliberately chosen your checkout format with these considerations in mind, it’s worth testing. The caveat is that checkout A/B testing requires meaningful traffic volume to reach significance quickly — which connects to broader questions about how to structure tests for lower-traffic sites, something we cover in our guide to A/B testing for small sites.
How to Prioritise These Six Fixes
Not all six friction points will be present in your checkout, and not all of them will have equal impact. Here’s a rough prioritisation framework based on the frequency and magnitude of impact we see in audits:
- Fix first (force multiplier): Forced account creation, unexpected costs — these cause outright abandonment at high rates and are usually fast to resolve
- Fix second (high leverage): Mobile checkout issues, trust signal absence at payment — high impact, often straightforward to address once identified
- Meaningful but situational: Unnecessary form fields, one-page vs multi-step format — worth addressing, but impact varies more by store type and audience
The most efficient way to work through these is to combine quantitative data (where in the checkout funnel are you losing the most users?) with qualitative data (session replay of those drop-off points). Funnel analysis tells you where to look; session replay tells you what people are actually doing when they leave.
This is a significant part of what our website and funnel service covers — not just identifying where conversion is leaking but instrumenting the right data to understand why, then building and testing the fixes systematically.
One More Thing: the Post-Purchase Experience
Checkout optimisation typically focuses on getting users through to purchase, but the order confirmation page and confirmation email are also part of the checkout experience — and they’re frequently left as platform defaults.
A well-crafted order confirmation does several things: it reduces buyer anxiety (the purchase definitely went through), it sets expectation for what happens next (shipping timeline, tracking), and it presents a moment to either upsell or reinforce the decision to buy. Most stores do none of these deliberately.
- Confirm the purchase clearly and immediately — show the order number, the items, the total
- Set a clear expectation for the next communication (shipping confirmation, tracking link)
- Consider a post-purchase upsell or cross-sell — conversion rates at this stage are higher than most stores expect because buyer intent is resolved
- Make the confirmation email something the customer wants to keep — clear, branded, with everything they’ll need to reference the order
None of this requires custom development on most platforms. It requires intentional configuration and copy — which is often faster to improve than the checkout form fields themselves.
Where to Start If You’re Not Sure
If you’re looking at this list and unsure which of these applies to your store, start with a structured checkout walkthrough: complete a full purchase on your own store, on mobile, on a slow connection, as a guest. Note every moment of hesitation or confusion. Then do it again in session replay with 10 real users.
That combination will surface your highest-priority friction points faster than any benchmark or checklist. The six patterns above are a map of where to look — but the specific issues in your store are visible in your own data.
If you want a second pair of eyes, we do checkout and funnel audits as part of our CRO work. Get in touch and we can talk through what a focused audit would involve for your setup.