Checkout friction is not a new problem, but it keeps costing merchants real money
Cart abandonment rates consistently hover around 70 percent across e-commerce sectors, and the root causes are rarely mysterious. Slow forms, forced account creation, session timeouts, and device-switching friction are all well-documented conversion killers. What is striking is how many merchants still treat these as acceptable defaults rather than urgent problems to fix.
The three pain points highlighted here, namely inconvenience, speed, and cross-device continuity, map directly onto what checkout optimisation research has been signalling for years. Consumers do not distinguish between a bad checkout and a bad brand. If the final steps of a purchase feel laborious, the association sticks. A shopper who abandons on Thursday is rarely a shopper who converts on Friday, even with a well-crafted recovery email.
For Dutch and Belgian online merchants, this is particularly relevant. Both markets have high smartphone penetration and consumers who routinely switch between devices during a single shopping journey. A checkout that treats a tablet session as a brand-new customer is not just annoying, it is a structural revenue leak. Cross-device stored credentials and seamless session continuity are no longer nice-to-have features, they are baseline expectations.
The practical implication is straightforward: audit your checkout flow from the perspective of a returning mobile customer who switches to desktop at the last step. How many fields reappear? Does the session survive? Is there a guest path that does not dead-end? These questions have measurable answers, and A/B testing each friction point individually will surface which ones carry the heaviest abandonment cost in your specific funnel.
Streamlining checkout is not about adding features. It is about removing obstacles. Every unnecessary field, every forced login, every expired session is a decision point where a customer can choose to leave. The merchants who treat checkout as a product, not a formality, are the ones who compound conversion gains over time.
Source: nytimes.com
