Your checkout works, but how hard is it making your customers work?

This all makes checkout an interesting place to look for opportunity, because there's a difference between a checkout that allows somebody to complete a purchase and one that's been designed around making that purchase as straightforward as possible.

Payment choice matters. So does speed. So does mobile experience, the information you provide about delivery, the amount of effort required from the customer and, crucially, how all of those things reflect who is actually buying from you and how they buy.

That last point became particularly important for Southern Sheeting.

When GENE began working with the team, there wasn't a shortage of opportunities to improve the eCommerce experience. The question was where to start, and where an investment could make the most meaningful difference to both the customer and the business.

The answer was sitting in the data.

The data said there was a problem. The customer told us what kind.

Every investment in a roadmap needs clear commercial justification, and Southern Sheeting had no shortage of opportunities to consider. Product pages needed attention. The basket needed work. There were improvements to be made across landing pages and the wider customer journey. Each had the potential to deliver value, but with a finite budget, the question was where that investment would make the greatest difference.

Identifying opportunities is relatively straightforward. Knowing which ones to prioritise, and why, requires a much deeper understanding of the business.

Southern Sheeting wanted a strong business case for the work it invested in, and evidence afterwards that the investment had delivered. So rather than starting with the most visible problem, we looked at the data available to us and at where customers were leaving the journey.

Checkout stood out.

Southern Sheeting's baseline checkout abandonment rate was 79.5%, while sessions-to-transaction sat at 0.95%, and the point at which that abandonment was happening mattered.

These weren't customers browsing a product page and deciding the product wasn't for them. They had already found what they needed, built a basket and made it to the highest-intent part of the journey.

Something was happening between the decision to buy and the completion of the transaction, but knowing where customers were dropping out was only half the job.

We also needed to understand who they were.

This wasn't just about checkout. It was about the trade customer.

Southern Sheeting serves both retail customers and a valuable base of professional and trade buyers, including installers and farming customers.

Those groups don't behave in the same way.

A retail customer might make an occasional purchase and have little reason to return for some time. Trade customers are different. They're buying materials for jobs, installations and customers of their own. They purchase more frequently, and Southern Sheeting knows that both their average order value and customer lifetime value are higher.

That makes their experience commercially important.

It also makes the context in which they're buying important.

A trade customer isn't necessarily sitting at a desk with plenty of time to work their way through an eCommerce journey. They might be between jobs, out on site or ordering materials for the next piece of work. They're busy, mobile and time-poor.

When we looked at Southern Sheeting's analytics through that lens, the opportunity became much clearer.

Mobile was a significant drop-off point, although desktop had problems too. The existing checkout was a fairly traditional, out-of-the-box experience. It functioned, but it hadn't been designed around the reality of the customers Southern Sheeting increasingly wanted eCommerce to serve.

That distinction matters. Improving checkout isn't simply about shortening a form or moving a button. It's about understanding what the customer is trying to do when they get there.

A checkout can work and still ask too much of the customer

A checkout can be technically functional and still introduce unnecessary friction.

For Southern Sheeting, that friction mattered particularly on mobile. Trade customers were often ordering between jobs or while out on site, yet the existing experience wasn't designed around the circumstances in which they were buying.

Payment choice, delivery information and the effort involved in completing an order all presented opportunities to make the transaction easier.

And with 79.5% of customers abandoning checkout, the commercial case for addressing those barriers was compelling.

There were other areas of the customer journey that deserved investment, but checkout offered a clear opportunity to improve the experience for a valuable customer group, with measurable results.

Designing the transaction around the customer

The resulting transformation brought together BlueFinch Checkout and Mollie, with a focus on making the buying experience faster, simpler and better suited to Southern Sheeting's customers.

We looked at the complete transaction: speed, usability, mobile behaviour, payment choice, delivery information and how naturally the payment experience fitted into the wider journey.

That included introducing a broader range of payment options, particularly mobile wallets, alongside improvements to the checkout flow and clearer delivery information at the point customers needed it.

For Southern Sheeting's trade customers, the aim was straightforward: make it easier to complete a purchase, wherever they happened to be.

The technology followed the customer need, rather than becoming the starting point.

Then came the important bit. Did it work?

The business case became measurable

In the first week, mobile checkout conversion increased by 12.5%.

Digital wallets quickly accounted for 14% of transactions.

And checkout conversion subsequently increased by 38.7% month-on-month.

For a project that began with a requirement to prove the value of development investment, those numbers matter, but there's another signal in them too.

Southern Sheeting hadn't suddenly found a new audience. The products hadn't changed. These were customers who were already finding the business, choosing what they needed and making their way towards a purchase.

What changed was how easily they could finish what they'd started. and that's why checkout deserves more scrutiny than the simple question of whether it works.

Your checkout isn't the destination. It's the last part of the journey you control.

Businesses spend enormous amounts of time, attention and money getting customers to the point of purchase.

Acquisition. SEO. Paid media. Content. Merchandising. Product information. Pricing. Site search. Performance. UX.

Every part of that journey is trying to move somebody closer to a decision.

By the time a customer reaches checkout, much of that work has succeeded.

The lesson from Southern Sheeting isn't that every merchant should make checkout the first item on their roadmap. Doing that without understanding the customer, the commercial opportunity and the data would miss the point entirely.

It's that “working” is too low a standard for one of the most commercially important parts of your ecommerce experience.

Look at who reaches your checkout. Look at where they leave. Look at the devices they're using, the ways they want to pay, the information they need and the circumstances in which they're buying, because the best place to invest next isn't necessarily the part of your eCommerce experience making the most noise.

It might be the point where customers have already decided to buy, and where making their job just a little easier can make a measurable difference to yours.

So, how hard is your checkout making your customers work?