Checkout
What is checkout?
Checkout is the last stretch of an online shop: the screens where someone enters an address, picks a courier and a payment method, and confirms the order. Every extra field, every extra step and every late surprise in the price is paid for in orders that never arrive. A checkout that works shows the final amount early, runs without an account, and can be completed on a phone.
Example
A thousand people reach the payment step in a month and 380 finish an order — 38 per cent. The recordings show two obstacles: delivery is only priced at the third step, and the shop insists on an account. Both go, the fields drop from fourteen to eight, and the courier office is picked on a map instead of from a dropdown.
Completion moves to 44 per cent, which is 440 orders. Those 60 extra orders at an average of €45 are €2,700 a month, from the same traffic and with no additional advertising. The amounts are illustrative.
Worth checking too is what the numbers do not show: error messages. “Invalid value” beside a phone field stops an order that “Ten digits, no spaces” would have saved.
Why it matters for a business
By checkout the traffic is already paid for. The people lost here chose a product, accepted the price and walked the whole site — the most expensive visitors a shop has. Hence the order of work: remove the reason first, send reminders second.
There is a legal side as well. Since 28 June 2025 European accessibility requirements apply to consumer e-commerce; micro-enterprises providing services — under 10 people and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of up to €2 million — stay outside the scope. Checkout fields, contrast and error messages are exactly where that shows. Marketing consent is a separate box that is never pre-ticked and never a condition of ordering. How we build this part is set out under online store development; how much each obstacle costs is a question of friction.
How to improve it
- Guest checkout; the account is offered once the order is placed.
- Delivery cost and the final total visible in the basket.
- Only the fields delivery and invoicing actually need.
- Office or locker chosen on a searchable map, not from a long list.
- Validation as people type, with text that says what to fix.
- One review screen before confirmation: what, where, when and how much.
- Testing on a real phone, one-handed, on a slow connection.