Five mistakes teams make with the checkout flow

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit the checkout flow.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Every extra step loses a measurable slice of buyers
• Show total cost early, because surprise fees kill carts
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Save progress so a dropped connection is not fatal. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Where to go from here

How to tell if yours is fine

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about the checkout flow before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Show total cost early, because surprise fees kill carts — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.