A couple weeks ago, I was consulting with a DTC brand that had all the right ingredients – solid traffic, a beautifully branded site, strong customer LTV. But something wasn’t adding up.
Despite their stellar funnel, conversion was plateauing.
So I did something I typically do in these scenarios: I bought something.
Ten minutes later, I had the answer.
Their checkout flow had six steps.
Six.
Worse, four of those steps had micro-frictions – things like forcing account creation, loading delays between shipping and billing screens, hard-to-edit form fields, and one that made me audibly groan: having to manually enter my address for both the shipping and billing (even though they were the same).
These weren’t massive roadblocks on their own.
But they were stacking.
And that stacking? It’s costing brands like this millions.
The Silent Killer: Micro-Friction
Everyone talks about funnel optimization. A/B testing. Page load speed. Personalization. But nobody talks enough about micro-friction at checkout – the tiny moments of confusion, annoyance, or unnecessary effort that compound and cause abandonment.
Here’s the truth: your customer didn’t come this far to think.
They came to buy.
Every additional field, every unnecessary click, every point of hesitation is like adding an ankle weight to a sprinter. Sure, they can still run – but not as fast. And definitely not as far.
Want to see what frictionless looks like?
What Amazon Knows That You Don’t
Amazon isn’t “winning” checkout because they have your credit card saved. They’re winning because they relentlessly optimized their flow down to a single, universal rule:
The 3-Click Rule: No more than three clicks from cart to confirmation.
One-click buy is the final form of this. But even when you’re not logged in, Amazon rarely asks for more than three clear, non-optional actions.
Compare that to many e-commerce sites – you’ve got to create an account, re-enter your shipping even if it’s saved, get tricked into signing up for a newsletter, fight with autofill, copy-paste a discount code from a separate tab…
The irony? Most brands think they’re customer-centric. But if you make your best customers do more work just to give you money, you’re not customer-centric. You’re just unaware.
What No One Tells You: It’s Not About More Features – It’s About Fewer Steps
Founders love to add things. Add Klarna. Add popups. Add loyalty points, post-purchase surveys, SMS capture…
But almost no one is asking: “What can we remove?”
Here’s the question I always pose to teams:
“If we had to reduce this to three clicks or less, what would we cut?”
You don’t even have to actually implement it yet. Just go through the thought experiment. It forces a ruthless kind of prioritization – the kind that surfaces bloat, reveals assumptions, and puts user experience above internal KPIs.
The best-performing checkouts I’ve seen in the last 12 months all had one thing in common: they removed more than they added.
What To Do This Week
Here’s your 15-minute audit:
- Go through your own checkout on both desktop and mobile. Time it.
- Count the number of actions (not pages) it takes from cart to confirmation.
- Identify every click, scroll, field, and interruption.
- Ask: “Is this essential, or legacy?”
Then ask a friend (not a coworker) to do the same. Watch what confuses or delays them. Those moments? That’s your friction.
Start removing just one this week. That’s it.
Because the best checkout flow isn’t the most beautiful. Or the most branded.
It’s the one that gets out of the way.
See you next Saturday.