Three myths about the checkout flow

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. A few things about the checkout flow that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

Every extra step loses a measurable slice of buyers. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

“Our platform handles it”

Save progress so a dropped connection is not fatal. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about the checkout flow before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every extra step loses a measurable slice of buyers — 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.