The Cost of Checkout Friction

On average, six out of every ten customers who start checkout never finish it. That isn’t a small leak; it’s a revenue drain hiding in plain sight. Silent losses, right at the point of maximum intent.

It’s the online equivalent of watching people queue up, ready to pay, and then quietly walk out of the store. No retailer would tolerate that in person, but online, it’s often accepted as normal.

The truth? Checkout is still one of the most neglected areas of ecommerce. Brands obsess over homepage redesigns, personalisation strategies, and traffic acquisition, but treat checkout like plumbing: functional, hidden, assumed. And that assumption is costing them customers.

The Cost of Friction

Let’s run the maths.

100,000 sessions per month
6,000 baskets created
3,000 checkouts started
2,000 completed
Average order value: £85

That’s a 2% overall site conversion rate, or to put it another way, 98% of visitors leave without buying.

If we zoom in on the checkout stage, that’s a 67% completion rate. Lift that to 73% and you’d add 180 more orders per month - the equivalent of £183,000 in annual revenue, without touching your ad budget, email strategy, or SEO rankings.

Another way to look at it: a six-point lift at checkout can deliver the same revenue impact as a major acquisition campaign, but it’s far cheaper, faster, and entirely within your control.

Why Friction Persists

So why does checkout underperform so consistently?

Because friction hides in plain sight. The form “works”, the page loads, the PSP integration doesn’t crash, but the flow creates doubt, delay, or distraction, and customers quietly drop out.

The most common culprits are depressingly simple:

• Unnecessary fields that make customers feel interrogated.

• Redirects that break the flow and erode trust.

• Buried wallets that force card entry even when faster options exist.

• Poor error handling that frustrates rather than guides.

• Limited delivery options that don’t fit how people actually want to receive their order.

• Lack of visible security cues that make customers second-guess whether their details are safe.

• Missing payment choices, especially Buy Now, Pay Later, which can make or break high-value conversions.

• No clear order summary, forcing users to backtrack just to confirm what they’re buying.

• No help at hand - when questions arise, there’s no chat, no reassurance, no recovery path.

• Forced account creation that interrupts momentum at the worst possible moment.

These problems are real, measurable, and solvable, but only if you look beyond the surface and into the subtleties of trust, convenience, and control.

Four Invisible Drains

1. Extra Fields

A brand we worked with saw a 3% lift in conversion by deleting just two fields: “Title” and “Second phone number.” That was it.

Every additional field carries a psychological cost. Customers ask: “Why do you need this?” If the answer isn’t obvious, hesitation creeps in, and hesitation kills momentum.

For Tommee Tippee, we applied the same principle when optimising their global checkout experiences. Fields were consolidated, auto-completion was added, and the form was reduced to its essentials. For a brand handling high traffic across multiple regions, shaving seconds off the process translated into significant revenue gains at scale.

2. Redirects

Redirects are relics of a past era, when hosted PSP pages were the only way to process secure transactions. Today, they’re conversion poison.

Why? Because they break trust. A customer who has built confidence in your brand is suddenly thrown onto a generic PSP page with different fonts, layouts, and messaging. Even a moment of doubt can be enough to abandon.

For Harts of Stur, we helped eliminate PSP redirects and replace them with in-frame 3DS. The result? More completed checkouts, with no redesign required.

Krispy Kreme faced similar issues when scaling its digital ordering channels. By embedding payment and removing unnecessary redirects, the business reduced friction and went on to quadruple online sales in just 12 months.

3. Wallets Buried

Wallets are intent buttons. Yet too often, they’re hidden beneath card entry forms - the digital equivalent of hiding the fast lane behind the slow one.

For SkateHut, simply moving PayPal and Apple Pay above the card entry box unlocked significant gains, particularly on mobile. Returning customers could complete in seconds rather than minutes.

For Tommee Tippee, the shift was even more pronounced. With 80% of their traffic on mobile, introducing instant checkout options via Apple Pay and Google Pay at the top of checkout wasn’t a “nice to have”, it was transformative. Abandonment rates fell, and customer feedback highlighted the convenience of one-tap payments on the go.

4. Error Handling

Error handling is checkout’s dirty secret. The classic: “Invalid postcode.” - delivered only after the customer has completed every other field and clicked “Pay.”

It’s frustrating, it feels like failure, and it’s unnecessary.

Inline validation is a simple fix. Show customers errors as they type. Provide forgiving, helpful copy. Instead of “Invalid postcode,” try: “Please enter without spaces”. Instead of “Invalid card,” try: “Check expiry date or try another payment method.”

For Vivactive, a brand handling sensitive health-related products, this shift was critical. Customers were often anxious to complete their orders quickly and privately. By introducing inline validation and rewriting error copy in plain, supportive language, Vivactive reduced failed submissions and improved customer trust in the brand.

One merchant we worked with saw 20% of failed submissions resolved at the first attempt simply by improving error handling. That’s a direct lift in completed orders, without a single design change.

Case Note: When Checkout Becomes Strategy

For B2B, friction isn’t just lost conversion - it’s cashflow.

Take Party Delights’ wholesale arm, Delights Direct. Their trade customers were ordering online, but payments were still handled via invoices sent after fulfilment. That meant weeks of delay, manual chasing, and uncertain cashflow.

By embedding Hokodo’s credit terms directly into checkout, we transformed the process. Trade customers could place orders instantly, with credit handled automatically. The result? Faster checkout, faster fulfilment, and a completely new revenue stream unlocked.

For consumer brands, checkout fixes drive incremental revenue. For B2B, they can transform the entire commercial model.

Checkout Isn’t a Form. It’s a Decision.

This is the shift in thinking every business needs to make.

Too many teams see checkout as an IT component: a form to be completed, validated, and submitted. In reality, checkout is a decision moment. The point where customer intent crystallises, or dissolves.

Design for decisions, not forms. Reduce effort. Build trust. Surface “yes” buttons. Guide recovery. And the numbers look after themselves.

Final Word

When your checkout is underperforming, the symptoms show up everywhere: inflated acquisition costs, flat repeat order rates, customer complaints about “broken” payments. But the root cause is usually the same: friction at the point of intent.

Your checkout isn’t “working” if 6 in 10 customers walk away at the till. The friction is costing you real money, and fixing it costs far less than finding more traffic. The fixes are not glamorous - they don’t require months of discovery or million-pound rebuilds - but they do require focus, discipline, and expertise.

At GENE, we’ve been leading checkout and payment optimisation for over a decade, from building Adobe Commerce’s default PayPal integration to pioneering wallet-first, headless checkouts for ambitious brands like Krispy Kreme, Tommee Tippee, and Party Delights.

Let’s show you how much revenue your checkout is leaving on the table, and how quickly you can win it back.