You almost never look at your own checkout the way a buyer does, which is exactly why it leaks sales. Set aside five minutes, open your product on your phone, and buy it. Note every moment you hesitate — each one is costing you real people.
What to check
- Does it still look like your brand, or does it dump them on a strange page?
- How many taps and fields between 'buy' and 'done' — and can any be removed?
- Any surprise: an unexpected fee, a forced account, a field that doesn't belong.
- Does it say clearly what happens after they pay?
Fix the biggest hesitation first
You don't need a redesign. Find the single moment that made you pause and fix that. Then buy it again. Small friction removed at checkout pays back faster than almost anything else you can do.
The Five Checks, in Order
An audit is only useful if it's fast enough to actually do, so run these five in sequence and fix the first thing that fails before moving on. Most abandoned checkouts die on one of them, and they're ordered roughly by how often they're the culprit.
Do this as the buyer, not the owner — open the live page in a private window and go through it as if you'd just arrived from an ad, with no context and no patience. The friction you've trained yourself to ignore is exactly what a first-time buyer feels.
- Is the full price, including any tax or fees, visible before the final step?
- How many fields must be filled — and can any be removed?
- Does it work and look right on a phone, thumb-first?
- Is there a line of reassurance near the button — refund, security, what's next?
- Does the button say what happens ("Pay £29") rather than a vague "Submit"?
Test It on the Device Your Buyers Actually Use
The most revealing part of the audit is buying your own product on your own phone, with a real card, all the way through. Owners audit on a big desktop screen where everything is comfortable; buyers are on a phone on mobile data, and the two experiences are not the same page. A field that's a minor annoyance on desktop can be a dealbreaker on a small screen.
Watch for the specific mobile failures: a form that doesn't bring up the numeric keypad for the card number, a button hidden below the fold, text too small to read without pinching, an autofill that fights the fields. One checkout that looked flawless on a laptop was losing most mobile buyers because the "complete order" button sat just under the keyboard and never appeared unless you knew to scroll.
Time it, too. If the whole purchase takes more than a minute of tapping, every extra step is a place to lose someone. Count the taps from "buy" to "done" and treat any you can remove as found money.
Close the Trust Gaps That Quietly Kill Sales
A lot of abandoned checkouts aren't about price or friction but a quiet loss of nerve at the final step. The buyer hesitates because something feels off, and nothing on the page reassures them. Small signals fix it: a plain line about your refund policy, a note that payment is secure, a sentence on what arrives and when.
Unexpected demands are the other trust killer. A field asking for a phone number on a digital download, a forced account signup before payment, a surprise fee at the last step — each reads as a reason to bail. Ask only for what you genuinely need to fulfil the order; every field you cut is friction removed and trust kept.
Match the checkout to the rest of your brand, too. A payment page that suddenly looks generic, or different from the site the buyer just came from, plants a seed of doubt about whether it's legitimate. Your name, your colours and the product clearly shown tell the buyer they're still in the right place.