The checkout changes that lifted a nursery revenue 31%
A garden nursery client had healthy traffic, full carts and thin sales. We changed nothing about the products and everything about the last three screens.
Cart abandonment is rarely about price. It is about surprise and effort: costs that appear late, forms that ask too much, and doubt that shows up at exactly the wrong moment. We attacked those three things one release at a time.
- Guest checkout first: account creation became an option after payment, not a gate before it.
- Shipping shown early: a cost estimator on the cart page, so no surprises on the final screen.
- One column, one job: each screen asks one thing, with a visible step indicator.
- Fewer fields: everything optional got deleted. Nine fields became five.
- Trust at the button: payment logos, the returns policy and a phone number beside Place Order.
Measure one change at a time
Each change shipped alone with a fortnight of data before the next. That discipline matters: two of our other ideas actually hurt conversion in testing and were rolled back. The five above earned their place.
Season over season, revenue finished 31% up on flat traffic. Nothing in the list is exotic. Checkout optimization is mostly the patient removal of reasons to hesitate.