Two thirds of their checkout traffic never finished
- The situation
- A home goods store doing about €1.8m a year had spent two quarters increasing ad spend with almost no revenue movement. They assumed the problem was traffic quality. The funnel said otherwise: people were reaching checkout in normal numbers and abandoning at the payment step.
- What we found
- Card only, no local wallets, in three markets where most people pay by bank transfer or Klarna. Shipping cost appeared for the first time on the final step. The address form asked for eleven fields including a company VAT number that only 4% of buyers had.
- What we changed
- Added the two local payment methods and one wallet, moved the delivery promise and cost above the cart, cut the form to seven fields and made the VAT field optional behind a toggle. Four releases over six weeks, each measured on its own before the next went out.
- The result
- Checkout completion moved from 38% to 50% — a 31% lift — with no change in ad spend. The payment methods alone accounted for roughly half of it.
Traffic was flat across the period. The lift came entirely from people who were already at the payment step and leaving.