Before/After: Checkout Redesign Halves Support Tickets at Episcope

Tech · 5 min read

Episcope, a mid-stage B2B ecommerce tool, found that ambiguous shipping rules and hidden fees were driving both cart abandonment and a deluge of support tickets. Their support team spent ~18% of man-hours fielding questions that originated from unclear form states and late-stage price surprises. A cross-functional initiative aimed to simplify the checkout experience and resolve the 'mystery charges' problem.

The redesign introduced inline validation, real-time shipping cost previews, progressive disclosure for optional upsells, and an explicit price breakdown summary before payment. Designers prototyped a single-page checkout with a sticky price summary and mobile-first inputs; engineers implemented server-side prevalidation to reduce back-and-forth errors. The team shipped incrementally over three sprints and monitored metrics closely with Amplitude.

Post-launch, Episcope saw a conversion lift of 18% on the checkout funnel and a 52% reduction in checkout-related support tickets within 30 days. Average contact handle time also dropped because agents no longer needed to explain the order flow. The tradeoffs included a small delay to rollout due to backend prevalidation work and increased complexity in shipping rule calculation, but the operational savings and revenue uplift justified the investment.