Realized my checkout flow was leaking $200 a day after watching a customer struggle at a coffee shop

I was at a local coffee shop in Austin last Tuesday, just waiting for my order. This guy in front of me tried to pay with a card, and the screen glitched on the tip screen for like 8 seconds before he gave up and walked away. It hit me that our own checkout page had a similar issue with a dropdown menu that took too long to load on mobile. I checked analytics later and saw we were losing about 200 users a day at that exact step. Fixed the dropdown to preload on page visit instead of on click, and our conversion rate jumped 12% within a week. Anyone else catch site issues by watching real people interact with other businesses?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason.paige5d agoMost Upvoted

Did anyone else notice how that tip screen glitch was basically a UX failure disguised as a customer service problem? I picked up a similar thing at a bookstore last month, watching someone get stuck on a subscription popup that blocked the whole checkout button. When I checked our own site, we had a chat widget that did the same thing on mobile - it covered the submit order button until you closed it. Moved the chat to a floating icon instead of a full banner, and our cart abandonment dropped by about 15 percent in two weeks.

rowank695d ago

The coffee shop thing is exactly how I caught our own problem too. I was at a Target in Denver watching a mom with two kids try to check out on her phone, and the cart kept loading over and over. Got back to the office and checked our own mobile cart page, sure enough we had a similar loop issue where the payment iframe would reload if you tapped too fast. We had to hardcode a delay so it didn't trigger a reload every time someone was just impatient. That one fix alone dropped our bounce rate at checkout by 8% in the first week. Sometimes you just need to see someone else's struggle to realize your own site has the same exact problem staring you in the face.