Why your checkout loses people on step three
Most abandoned carts are not a pricing problem. They are a trust problem that shows up at the exact moment you ask for card details.
Every store we audit has the same shape of funnel drop-off. Traffic looks healthy, product pages perform, the cart fills — and then somewhere between the shipping form and the payment field, between a third and three quarters of buyers leave.
The instinct is to blame price. It is almost never price. People who have added an item, entered an address and reached payment have already decided they want the thing. What stops them is a small accumulation of doubt: an unexpected delivery fee, a payment method they do not recognise, a page that reloads and loses their details, or simply no visible signal that the site is safe.
Show the total early. If shipping is calculated, estimate it on the product page. The single most damaging moment in any checkout is a number going up after someone has committed.
Offer the payment methods people actually use. In Nigeria that means card, bank transfer and USSD — not card alone. We have seen completion rates move 20 points on that change by itself.
Never lose entered data. A failed charge should return to a populated form, not an empty one. If your checkout reloads the page between steps, you are asking people to re-earn their own patience.
Fix those three and you will usually recover more revenue than a discount campaign would, without cutting your margin to do it.
Working on something this applies to?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you what we would do, whether or not you hire us to do it.
