8 Checkout Friction Points That Are Quietly Draining Your Revenue (And How to Fix Each One)

By Jonathan · Founder, PageGains

The average e-commerce checkout abandonment rate sits around 70%. That means roughly 7 out of every 10 people who click "proceed to checkout" never complete their order. Most store owners blame price sensitivity or indecision — but when you actually audit the checkout page, you find something different: small, fixable problems that compound into a wall of friction the customer quietly gives up on.

Forced Account Creation Before Purchase

Baymard Institute has tracked this for years, and it consistently ranks as one of the top two reasons people abandon checkout. A customer found what they wanted, added it to cart, started checkout — and then hit a gate demanding they create an account before paying. At that exact moment, their intent is at its peak. Making them stop to register is like a cashier at a grocery store asking you to fill out a form before ringing up your items.

The fix is straightforward: make guest checkout the default path. Put it first, above the "sign in" option. After the order is confirmed, you can invite them to save their details with a single checkbox — "Save my info for next time" — and the conversion from guest to account-holder at that stage is actually quite high because the trust is already established. You've earned it by not blocking them.

Showing Unexpected Costs Too Late

This one is brutal because the damage happens at the worst possible time. A customer works through your entire checkout — enters their address, picks a shipping option, fills in their card number — and then sees a $12 shipping fee appear for the first time on the order summary page. That's not a checkout problem. That's a trust problem. They feel misled.

If your shipping isn't free, surface the estimated cost on the product page and again in the cart. Give people a postcode-based shipping estimator before they commit to the checkout flow. Yes, some people will bail earlier. But those aren't lost sales — those are customers who would have abandoned at the payment step anyway, just after wasting more of their time and yours. Transparency early reduces abandonment late.

Too Many Form Fields

Count the fields in your checkout form right now. The median optimized checkout has 7 fields. Baymard's research found that the average U.S. e-commerce site has 14.88 fields — more than double. Every extra field is a micro-decision that chips away at momentum.

Audit every field and ask: do we actually need this to fulfill the order, or are we collecting it for our CRM convenience? "Phone number" is a common offender — most stores don't need it to ship a package, but they include it as a default. If you do need it, label it clearly ("In case we need to contact you about your delivery") so it doesn't feel like data harvesting. Combine First Name and Last Name into one field. Remove the "Company" field unless you're B2B. Address Line 2 can be collapsible. These aren't dramatic redesigns — they're small removals that add up to a noticeably faster experience.

No Trust Signals at the Point of Payment

The moment someone is about to type in their card number is the highest-anxiety moment in the entire purchase journey. This is exactly where most checkout pages go quiet — plain form, no reassurance, just a box waiting for 16 digits.

Add trust signals right here, not buried in the footer. Display security badges (Norton, McAfee, SSL lock icon) adjacent to the payment fields. Show your return policy in one line — "Free returns within 30 days" — directly above or below the "Complete Order" button. If you have a customer service contact, put it on this page: "Questions? Chat with us or call 1-800-XXX-XXXX." These elements cost you nothing to add and they directly address the fear that peaks at payment. Think of it as the page doing the reassurance work your sales rep would do in person.

A Confusing or Anxiety-Inducing CTA Button

The final button matters more than most people think. "Submit" is the worst — it sounds like paperwork. "Place Order" is neutral. "Complete My Order" is better. "Pay Now & Get Free Shipping" — if that's relevant — is better still, because it's specific about what happens next and reminds them of a benefit simultaneously.

Beyond the label, look at the button itself. Is it visually dominant on the page? Many checkout pages bury the CTA in a sea of text, making the customer hunt for what to click. The button should be the most prominent element on the screen at the payment step. Use a color that contrasts with the rest of the page. Make it large enough to tap comfortably on mobile — Apple's Human Interface Guidelines recommend a minimum tap target of 44x44 points for good reason. Test your button label before anything else on this page. It's a low-effort, high-signal test.

Mobile Checkout That Wasn't Actually Designed for Mobile

More than 60% of e-commerce traffic is mobile, but most checkout flows were built on desktop and "adapted." That's not the same thing. Adapted mobile checkout tends to have tiny tap targets, keyboard types that don't match input fields (a numeric keyboard should auto-launch for card numbers and postal codes, not a QWERTY keyboard), and modals that half-cover the screen without a clear way to dismiss them.

Do a full checkout run on your own phone — not in a desktop browser with a device emulator, on an actual phone, on a real cellular connection. Notice where you have to zoom, where you mistype because fields are too small, where the keyboard covers the field you're trying to fill. Then fix those specific things. Also check: does your checkout support Apple Pay and Google Pay? One-tap payment options dramatically cut mobile abandonment because they bypass the card-entry problem entirely.

No Progress Indicator

Multi-step checkout without a progress bar is like being in an airport without any signage. You keep moving but you have no idea how far you've come or how much is left. That uncertainty creates anxiety, and anxiety creates drop-off.

A simple step indicator — "Step 2 of 3: Shipping" — does several things at once. It tells the customer where they are. It shows how little is left. And psychologically, it makes the remaining steps feel more manageable because they're named and bounded. If your checkout is genuinely one long page rather than multi-step, use visual section headers ("1. Contact Info → 2. Shipping → 3. Payment") to create the same sense of structured progress. The goal is to make the finish line visible at every point in the process.

Checkout Errors That Feel Like Punishment

Card declined. Address not recognized. CVV doesn't match. These errors happen — but the way most checkout pages handle them is a conversion disaster. The error message appears at the top of the page in small red text, the form resets several fields, and the customer has to figure out what went wrong and re-enter data they already typed correctly.

Inline validation is the fix. Flag problems at the field level, in real time, so the customer knows immediately that their postcode format is wrong or that their card number is one digit short — before they hit "Submit" and lose everything. For payment errors specifically, be specific and non-accusatory: "Your card was declined — please check the card number and try again, or use a different payment method" beats "Payment failed." Also, never clear fields that were filled in correctly. If the card number was wrong, clear that field — not the name, address, and email the customer just spent two minutes entering.

The Bottom Line

Checkout abandonment is rarely about one catastrophic failure. It's about a sequence of small frictions — an extra field here, a missing trust signal there, a confusing error message at the worst possible moment — that accumulate until the customer quietly closes the tab. The frustrating thing is that most of these problems are invisible to the people running the store because they never actually sit down and complete a purchase the way a real customer does.

Start with an audit. Go through your own checkout on desktop and mobile, ideally with someone who isn't familiar with your site watching over your shoulder or recorded via session replay. Then stack-rank what you find against the eight issues above. Not every fix requires a developer — some of the highest-impact changes are copy changes on a button, a trust badge added next to a payment field, or a guest checkout option moved above the login form.

The checkout page is the last ten meters of a race you've already run. You've paid for the traffic, done the merchandising, written the product descriptions, run the promotions. Don't let friction in the final step bleed out the returns on everything that came before it.