Signs it is time to revisit the checkout flow

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few signals that the checkout flow is due some attention.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Every extra step loses a measurable slice of buyers
• Show total cost early, because surprise fees kill carts

Where to start

Save progress so a dropped connection is not fatal. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.