You have invested thousands of euros in acquisition campaigns. You have made the user fall in love with your product, add it to their cart and... at the last second, they leave. They abandon the purchase process and you never hear from them again.
If this sounds familiar, you are not alone: the average checkout abandonment rate is around 70%. But here is the key: that user has already made the decision to buy — your payment process is just the thing that tripped them up. It invited them to leave.
Optimising the checkout is not an aesthetic improvement — it is the action with the most direct impact on your results. In this post we explain how to stop losing customers at the very last point of all your sales efforts.
The checkout is the moment of greatest psychological friction. It is the moment when the user reaches for their card and asks themselves: "Do I really need this?" If at that very instant you ask them for their ID three times or force them to create an account, you are giving them exactly the time they need to change their mind. And that is not in your interest.
At Boost we call this the "critical point of the process." Every percentage point you recover at checkout goes straight to net profit, because that traffic has already been paid for. It is the ultimate expression of Growth from within: making the most of what you already have and increasing your chances of selling from there.
One of the most common mistakes we detect when auditing our clients' websites and checkouts is too many steps. A purchase process that feels like a police interrogation exhausts the user and ends up driving them away.
The golden rule is simple: only ask for what is strictly necessary to ship the package and take payment.
The idea is to make things easy for the user. Let them finish the purchase as quickly as possible and ask the non-essential questions afterwards. The faster and more comfortably they move through the process, the less likely they are to think twice.
As with everything in the digital world, there is no universal answer — but there is a trend:
One-page: Ideal for impulse purchases and low-value baskets. It reduces the sense of "effort". It also works very well when the user has bought before, as it streamlines the entire process.
Multi-step: Works well for high-value or complex products (such as insurance), where the user needs to feel each step is safe. It also allows you to add messages that break down barriers (for example, something like "100% secure purchase").
Boost's advice: Fewer clicks is always better, but clarity beats brevity. Sometimes it is worth taking the time and space to clarify certain things, allowing the user to review their order or explaining the next steps.
Nobody likes entering a tunnel without seeing the light at the end. Including a progress bar is one of the most effective UX improvements when it comes to checkout. It is a small improvement to any purchase form that delivers good results. We promise.
Telling the user they are at "Step 2 of 3" reduces their anxiety and gives them a sense of progress. It is a small psychological trick that minimises abandonment from fatigue. At Boost we have tested this technique with many of our clients — and it works.
If your ecommerce runs on Shopify, you have a competitive advantage that most businesses on "legacy" platforms (like older Magento or bespoke builds) envy: the speed of iteration. In the world of CRO, time is money — every week you spend with a mediocre checkout is a week of lost sales.
At Boost, we not only know the Shopify ecosystem — we know how to squeeze every drop from it so your conversion rate makes a qualitative leap without putting the stability of your store at risk.
Until recently, modifying the Shopify checkout was a murky territory reserved for a select few. With the arrival of Checkout Extensibility, the rules have changed. Now we can personalise the payment experience safely, quickly and — most importantly — without breaking future platform updates.
This allows us to:
Thanks to this, Shopify has perfected a single-page checkout, optimised to be the fastest in the world (especially on mobile). Our job at Boost is to configure this environment so that Shop Pay (one-click payment) takes centre stage.
Let us be realistic: nobody likes filling in forms. In the world of ecommerce, the form is not a database for your marketing team — it is a bridge (sometimes a very fragile one) to the sale. Overly long forms kill conversion.
To fix this, reduce the steps to the strictly essential. If you do not need the second surname or phone number to process the order, remove them. Every extra field is an opportunity for the user to think twice. At Boost, we work to make the user feel like they are "gliding" through the process rather than answering an interrogation.
There is nothing more frustrating than filling in ten fields, pressing "Complete purchase" and the page loading to show three red errors you had not spotted. It is a far more common mistake than you imagine: confusing error messages that block the user.
Real-time validation is your last-second lifesaver. It means alerting the user the moment they make a mistake (for example, an incorrect email format) before they try to proceed. This reduces anxiety, avoids page reloads and maintains the rhythm of the purchase. If the user feels guided, they do not abandon.
Time is your customer's scarcest resource. Forcing someone to manually type their street, number, floor, postcode and region on a mobile screen is an open invitation to abandon.
Integrating autocomplete tools (such as the Google Maps API) lets the user just type the first three letters of their address and the system does the rest. You not only save vital 30 seconds — you also eliminate shipping errors and logistical returns. It is a small technical improvement with a massive impact on cash flow.
When the user reaches the credit card field, their brain enters "alert" mode. This is the point of maximum psychological friction. This is where we apply the power of Social Proof.
Being secure is not enough — you need to look secure. Including payment badges, mentions of your returns policy or even a brief customer testimonial right in the checkout can be the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
Unlike traditional CRO consultancies that get lost in six-month audits, at Boost we apply a 5-step testing process designed to give you agility:
What does this method produce? Cases like DogfyDiet, where we achieved a 143% increase in conversion rate and +66% in online sales simply by optimising the funnel and eliminating friction. We are not a design agency — we are your digital partner to start selling more.
You have approved the budget, designed an incredible ad on Meta or Google Ads, and the CTR (click-through rate) is the envy of the industry. But when you...
Artificial intelligence has gone from being a technological promise to becoming a key element in many business decisions. When AI enters the...
For years, many business decisions have relied on accumulated experience and dashboards summarizing key metrics. This approach works up to a point, but it...
