Checkout: where you lose the orders you've already paid for

A visitor who has reached checkout is the most expensive person in your store. You paid to bring them, you convinced them to choose, they added to cart. Everything that follows is yours to lose.

This article is about what loses orders there. Not general CRO theory — things we see repeatedly in real stores.

1. Costs that only appear at the end

The most common cause of abandonment, everywhere in the world, is the same thing: the customer sees the delivery charge only at the final step and recalculates.

It isn't that delivery is expensive. It's that it appears late. The same amount, shown on the product page, doesn't produce the same abandonment. Show the cost as early as you can, even as an estimate.

2. Forcing account creation

It still happens. Somebody decided they wanted the customer database, and the price is a share of your orders. Guest checkout, with the option to save the details after placing the order, gives you the same database at no cost.

3. A form asking for what you don't need

Every additional field lowers completion. Ask yourself, for each one: what do I do with this information? If the answer is “it might be useful one day”, remove it.

• First name and surname separately, when one field would do
• The county or region, when it can be derived from the town
• The postcode, if none of the couriers you use require it
• “How did you hear about us”, at checkout

4. Missing payment methods

Payment methods are market expectations, not preferences. In some markets cash on delivery remains dominant in whole categories; a store that doesn't offer it loses customers who won't discuss it — they simply leave.

At the other end, if you sell above a certain price point and don't offer instalments or buy-now-pay-later, you lose entire orders. Check what your market actually expects rather than what you'd prefer to support.

5. Validation that tells you off

Fields turning red while you're still typing. Messages saying “invalid data” without saying which. Forms that empty themselves after an error. Each one is a lost order, and none of them appears in any report.

The simple rule: validate after the person has finished the field, say exactly what's wrong, and never wipe what they typed.

6. Slowness, which costs double here

Checkout is the heaviest page in a Magento store: it can't be served from cache, it recalculates tax and shipping on every change, and it loads the payment modules.

On the stock theme, every address change triggers recalculations you can see happening. On Hyvä the same operations feel instant, because you're no longer going through the old JavaScript stack. It's one of the few places where the platform difference shows up directly in conversion.

How to find out which of these affects you

1. 01Measure abandonment step by step, not overall. A single figure for the whole checkout tells you nothing; one per step shows you exactly where they leave.
2. 02Look at mobile separately. That's nearly always where the problem is.
3. 03Place an order yourself, from your own phone, on mobile data. Not on wi-fi, not on desktop. It's the cheapest audit available and it takes ten minutes.
4. 04Ask your support team. The people answering the phone already know what doesn't work; usually nobody has asked them.