What E-Commerce Brands Get Wrong About Checkout Optimisation

Checkout is the most valuable page in your entire e-commerce store — and most brands treat it like an afterthought. The average cart abandonment rate sits between 70–75% across industries, according to data aggregated by the Baymard Institute, and a significant portion of that abandonment happens not because customers changed their mind, but because the checkout experience created friction they weren't willing to push through. Most optimisation budgets go toward acquisition: ads, SEO, influencers. But the checkout page is where that spend either pays off or evaporates.

Key Takeaways

• Cart abandonment rates of 70–75% are industry-wide, and most causes are fixable UX problems, not buyer intent issues.
• Unexpected costs — including shipping, taxes, and fees — are the single most cited reason customers abandon checkout.
• Mobile checkout conversion rates significantly trail desktop, yet mobile accounts for the majority of e-commerce traffic in most markets.
• Trust signals, form friction, and payment optionality are the three highest-leverage areas for checkout improvement.
• Brands that invest in checkout optimisation consistently see compounding returns, because every improvement applies to every future sale.

Why do brands underinvest in checkout optimisation?

The honest answer: checkout feels solved. A payment processor is integrated, orders are coming through, and the operational side is working. So attention moves to growth channels.

But there is a difference between a checkout that functions and a checkout that converts. Most e-commerce checkouts fall into the first category. They process transactions. They don't maximise them.

Part of the problem is measurement. Most brands track overall conversion rate — visitors to purchases — without isolating checkout-specific drop-off. When you don't see the leak, you don't fix it. Setting up a proper funnel in Google Analytics 4, with distinct steps from cart to order confirmation, often reveals a more alarming picture than brands expect.

What are the most common checkout mistakes SMBs make?

Revealing costs too late

Baymard's research consistently identifies unexpected costs as the top reason for checkout abandonment. Shipping fees, taxes, and handling charges that appear only on the final summary page break trust at the worst possible moment.

The buyer has spent time and mental energy selecting products. When a $12 shipping fee appears at step three of a five-step checkout, it doesn't just cost you that sale. It damages the brand perception that your marketing spend built.

Fix: surface estimated shipping and tax costs on the product page, in the cart, and early in the checkout flow. Transparency compounds trust.

Forcing account creation

Mandatory account creation before purchase is still one of the most common friction points in e-commerce — particularly for Australian and Canadian SMBs running Shopify or WooCommerce stores with default configurations.

Baymard estimates that around 26% of shoppers abandon checkout specifically because they're forced to create an account. Guest checkout is not a compromise. It's a conversion lever.

The counterintuitive truth: customers who buy as guests can be re-engaged post-purchase through email marketing and invited to create an account then, when they already have a reason to trust you.

Poorly optimised mobile checkout

Mobile accounts for over 60% of e-commerce traffic globally, but mobile conversion rates typically run 30–50% lower than desktop across most categories. A significant part of that gap is checkout-specific.

Small tap targets, keyboard types that don't match field requirements (e.g. a text keyboard appearing for a numeric postcode field), address autofill that breaks on certain devices, and payment flows that open external browser windows — these are real, measurable conversion killers.

Apple Pay and Google Pay adoption matters here too. One-tap payment options can cut mobile checkout time by more than 50%. Brands that haven't enabled these in their checkout are leaving a meaningful conversion gap on the table.

Too many form fields

The average checkout in the US asks for around 15 form fields. Baymard's research suggests the optimised number is closer to 7–8 for most purchase types.

Every unnecessary field is a micro-decision point. Each one adds cognitive load and time. Common culprits include:

• Separate first name and last name fields where one field would work
• Company name fields shown prominently for B2C stores
• Address line 2 shown as a full required field
• Phone number required when it isn't needed for fulfilment

Audit your form fields honestly. If you can't explain why you collect a piece of information and how it directly improves fulfilment or experience, remove it.

Weak trust signals

Checkout is the moment of maximum anxiety in the buying journey. Customers are entering payment details on a site they may have visited for the first time that day.

Trust signals that belong in the checkout — and often aren't there — include:

• SSL indicators and security badges near payment fields
• Clear return policy links (not buried in the footer)
• Recognisable payment logos
• Real customer review counts near the order summary
• Live support options, even just a chat widget or phone number

This is especially important for brands selling higher-ticket items in Singapore and the US, where the cost-of-mistake perception is higher and trust thresholds are correspondingly elevated.

What does checkout optimisation actually look like in practice?

The brands that do this well share a few common traits.

First, they treat checkout as a product, not a configuration. They have someone whose job it is to monitor drop-off rates, run experiments, and iterate on the experience. This doesn't require a large team — it requires intention.

Second, they use real user testing, not just analytics. Watching session recordings (tools like Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, or PostHog make this accessible even at SMB scale) reveals behaviour that funnel data can't. You'll see where users pause, where they backtrack, and where they give up.

Third, they test incrementally. A/B testing checkout changes — one variable at a time — is the only reliable way to know whether a change helped or hurt. Redesigning the entire checkout at once makes it impossible to know what moved the needle.

Lenka Studio works with e-commerce brands that often discover their checkout is the single highest-ROI area to address before scaling ad spend. Converting 3–5% more of existing traffic is usually cheaper and faster than acquiring 3–5% more traffic.

Is checkout optimisation different for subscription businesses?

Yes, meaningfully so. For subscription e-commerce, the checkout moment carries additional weight because customers are committing to a recurring relationship, not just a single transaction.

Key differences include:

• Subscription terms need to be clearly displayed before payment — unclear commitment periods drive post-purchase chargebacks and cancellations
• Trial-to-paid conversion flows need distinct design treatment; the "it's free to start" message can't obscure what comes next
• Payment failure recovery flows need to be built into the checkout architecture from the start, not retrofitted later

Brands in this space often discover these gaps when they start losing customers not at acquisition but at renewal — which by that point has compounded into a significant LTV problem.

What metrics should you actually be tracking?

Most brands track too little or measure the wrong things. The metrics that matter for checkout performance:

• Checkout initiation rate: what percentage of cart views lead to checkout being started
• Checkout completion rate: what percentage of checkout initiations lead to a completed order
• Step-level drop-off: which specific checkout step has the highest abandonment
• Payment failure rate: how often payment attempts fail, and why
• Mobile vs desktop conversion gap: the size of this gap tells you how much mobile work remains

If you're not confident in where your brand's overall digital health stands, a structured brand health score assessment can surface gaps in customer experience, trust, and conversion that often trace back to checkout and post-purchase flows.

When is checkout optimisation the wrong priority?

If your traffic volume is very low — under a few hundred monthly sessions — checkout optimisation will produce too small a sample to measure meaningful changes. In that case, acquisition is the right first investment.

Similarly, if your product-market fit is unresolved — if customers who do buy aren't satisfied with what they receive — optimising checkout will just accelerate returns and negative reviews. Fit comes before funnel.

But for most SMBs in Australia, Singapore, Canada, or the US running stores with reasonable traffic and consistent sales, the checkout is almost certainly underperforming relative to its potential. The question is not whether to optimise it — it's how far up the priority list it belongs.

Frequently Asked Questions

If your checkout isn't performing at the level your traffic deserves, that's a solvable problem — and usually a faster win than any acquisition channel. The team at Lenka Studio helps e-commerce brands diagnose and improve conversion performance across the full purchase funnel. Reach out if you'd like a second opinion on where your store is losing revenue it shouldn't be.