By Sean Clarke, Founder PacificIQ and EcomIQ

Last weekend I tried to buy a pair of running shoes from a DTC brand I'd been watching for months. Built a great Instagram presence, the product looked solid, the price was right.

I got to checkout. Bounced.

Not because I changed my mind. Because the checkout wanted me to create an account before it would even tell me what shipping was going to cost.

That brand spent real money getting me to the cart. They had me ready to pay. Then they fumbled it at the goal line, on the one part of the funnel they fully control.

This stuff happens every day on Shopify stores doing $500K to $5M. It's the most expensive mistake operators make, because the traffic is already paid for.

Why checkout is where the money actually moves

Baymard Institute, who do the deepest research on this, put global cart abandonment at around 70%. Seven out of ten people who add to cart never finish.

Some of that is window shopping. Plenty of it isn't.

The biggest reasons people bail at checkout, in order: surprise costs at 48%, forced account creation at 26%, trust issues at 25%, slow delivery at 23%, and a checkout that's too long or complicated at 22%.

You can't do much about delivery speed without changing your fulfillment setup. The other four are fixable this week.

Here's where I'd start.

1. Move to one-page checkout, or stop fighting it

Shopify rolled out one-page checkout to almost every store on the platform. If you're still on the legacy three-page flow, or you're running a custom multi-step build through some app, switch back.

I've seen operators move from custom checkouts back to Shopify native and pick up two to four points of checkout conversion overnight. That's not a small number. On a $1M store, that's $20K to $40K a year in pure margin recovery.

The native flow has progress visible, fewer screens, and it autofills aggressively. Let it do its job.

2. Kill forced account creation

If your checkout is asking shoppers to create an account before they buy, turn it off today.

I get the temptation. You want emails. You want to remarket. You want post-purchase data.

There are twelve better ways to capture an email than holding a customer hostage at checkout. Klaviyo will collect it from a popup, a post-purchase flow, or the order confirmation page. Shop Pay will store it for you. The customer will get added to your list either way.

What you lose by forcing it is the 26% who walk away. That's not theoretical. That's revenue.

Set checkout to guest by default. Offer account creation on the thank-you page with a one-click prompt to save their details for next time. Same outcome, no friction.

3. Show the real cost early

The single biggest reason people abandon is they get to checkout and the total is higher than they expected.

Shipping fees, taxes, currency conversion, surprise duty for international shoppers, all of it.

A few things to do here. If you offer free shipping over a threshold, put that threshold on every page, the cart drawer especially. Surface estimated shipping in the cart, not at the final step. If you ship internationally, look at a DDP solution like Global-E so duty is baked into the displayed price for those customers, eyes wide open.

The principle is simple. The customer should never see a number at the final step that they weren't expecting in the cart.

4. Turn on every accelerated payment method you can

Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Link.

If a returning customer with Shop Pay can buy from your store in two taps, you want that path available. Shopify's own data on Shop Pay versus standard checkout shows a meaningful conversion lift, double-digit percentage points in some categories.

Same goes for autofill on the address fields. If your theme is breaking browser autofill, fix it. Mobile checkout especially lives or dies on autofill working properly.

The 60-second checkout is over. Operators competing right now are working with a 10-second checkout for returning customers. If yours takes longer, you're leaking.

5. Actually look at where people drop

Most brands track final conversion rate and that's it.

That's flying blind. You need to see step by step where shoppers drop, where they hesitate, and what's causing friction.

In Shopify Analytics, use the Conversion Rate Breakdown report to track how customers move through the funnel from Browsing Session to Add to Cart to Reached Checkout to Checkout Complete. It's already built in, you don't need a third-party tool to get started.

Pro tip: if you offer Quick Buy, reorder links, or email-to-cart options, enable the Open Funnel view. Shopify can still capture conversion data when shoppers move through the funnel out of order, but it won't count them correctly unless Open Funnel is on.

Microsoft Clarity is free and gives you session replays and heatmaps on top of that. If you want to go deeper, Hotjar or Lucky Orange will get you there.

Spend an hour a week watching ten replays of checkout sessions. You'll find things in the first session you watch. Forms breaking on iPhone, a shipping option that's confusing, a coupon field drawing eyes away from the buy button.

You can't fix a leak you can't see.

Where to start: crawl, walk, run

Crawl, this week. Turn on Shop Pay. Switch to guest checkout. Surface shipping costs in the cart drawer. Three changes, no developer needed.

Walk, this month. Install Microsoft Clarity. Set up Shopify's funnel reports. Watch ten replays. Fix the three worst issues you spot.

Run, this quarter. If you're shipping internationally and not on a DDP setup, look at Global-E. If you're on a custom checkout from your dev team, audit whether it's still earning its keep against the native one-page flow.

Most brands spend 90% of their effort getting traffic and 10% on what happens once traffic shows up. Flip that ratio for one quarter and tell me how it goes.

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