Before/After: Reworking Checkout Flow for D2C Brand Reduced Cart Abandonment 18%

Tech · 6 min read

The original checkout for Soluna Home placed promotional banners and cross-sell modules inside the payment flow, creating visual noise and decision paralysis. Heatmaps showed users scrolling past form fields and session replays captured attempts to tap discounted banners that opened full-screen overlays. The product team hypothesized that in-flow promotions caused abandonment.

Designers tested a stripped-down checkout that removed tertiary content, elevated the progress indicator, and auto-focused the first input field. The experiment also tightened the shipping-payment switcher to a single, persistent summary and introduced inline validation for card fields. After running the test on 60,000 sessions, the optimized flow reduced cart abandonment by 18% and decreased time-to-complete by 22% on mobile.

Post-launch work focused on reintroducing promotions without disrupting flow. The team created a post-purchase offers module on the confirmation page and personalized follow-up emails. Quarterly revenue lift from the checkout redesign covered the design sprint and paid for a usability lab upgrade within two months.