When customers abandon checkout: what goes wrong and how to fix it.

You've built the shop, photographed the products, written the descriptions. Traffic arrives, people add things to their basket, then vanish at checkout. It happens to three in four visitors, and most business owners have no idea why.

The problem is rarely the product or the price. It's the final few screens between 'proceed to checkout' and 'order confirmed' where friction lives. Small obstacles that seem harmless to you feel like deal-breakers to someone spending money on a phone at lunchtime.

Surprise costs that appear too late

Delivery fees, handling charges, VAT that wasn't shown earlier. When the final total jumps higher than expected, trust collapses. People assume they've been misled, so they leave.

Show the full price early. If delivery depends on weight or location, give an estimate on the product page and let people enter their postcode before checkout starts. Transparency beats a lower headline price every time.

When the final total jumps higher than expected, trust collapses

Forced account creation before buying

Asking someone to register, pick a password and confirm an email before they can pay is the fastest way to lose a sale. They came to buy a thing, not join a membership.

Offer guest checkout. Let people pay with just a name, email and delivery address. You can invite them to create an account after the order is placed, when the pressure is off and they've already committed.

When we relaunched the Surplush shop

Surplush sells wholesale cleaning and packaging supplies to businesses in Norwich, Cambridge and London, delivered by e-cargo bike. A lot happens behind each order: multiple suppliers, different couriers in each city, invoices for trade accounts, delivery days that shift with bank holidays.

We rebuilt checkout so card payments happen in the background through an AWS Lambda. That means the customer isn't held up while invoices generate and supplier emails go out. The payment completes quickly, and all the complicated routing happens afterwards without blocking the sale.

Too many form fields

Every extra field is a reason to quit. Asking for a company registration number, a fax number, or splitting the address into six separate boxes all slow people down and make errors more likely.

Cut fields to the minimum. Name, email, delivery address, payment details. If you need more information, ask for it after the order in a follow-up email. Postcode lookup tools help too, so people don't have to type their full address manually.

No clear progress or way back

Multi-step checkouts fail when customers can't see where they are or how many steps remain. If they make a mistake and can't go back to fix it without losing everything, they'll give up rather than start over.

Show progress clearly. Use a step indicator ('Delivery / Payment / Confirm') and let people edit earlier steps without clearing their basket. Small reassurances like 'You can change this later' reduce anxiety.

Payment options that don't match expectations

If your customers expect Apple Pay or Google Pay and you only take card details manually, you've added friction. Older customers may want bank transfer or invoice options that aren't offered.

Match your audience. For consumer sales, card and digital wallet options cover most people. For trade customers, invoicing and payment terms matter more. We added trade account invoicing to Surplush because their business buyers needed it, and it's now a significant part of their revenue.

Mobile checkout that doesn't work

More than half of online shopping starts on a phone. If your checkout doesn't fit the screen, has tiny buttons, or doesn't support autofill, you're losing sales to frustration.

Test on a real phone. Not just a narrow browser window on your laptop. Use your own device, try to buy something, and notice everywhere you have to pinch, zoom, or retype. Then fix those points.

What to do next

Open your shop on your phone right now and try to buy something. Don't skip steps or take shortcuts because you know the system. Go through it like a customer would.

Write down every point where you hesitate, have to think, or aren't sure what happens next. Those are the points where real customers leave.

Then fix them, one at a time. You don't need a full redesign. You need to remove the small barriers that make buying harder than it should be.