The purchase journey, end to end

Checkout and purchase journey

Sign-in and guest checkout, address entry and validation, choice of delivery method, order summary, confirmation. Every step added costs customers; every step removed carelessly costs failed orders. The trade-off is made on data, not on the opinion of whoever spoke last.

• Fewer steps and fewer input fields
• Guest checkout, deferred account creation, social login
• Error handling: what the customer reads when something fails
• The mobile journey, where most drop-off happens

Payment

A missing payment method is a lost order, and poorly integrated strong customer authentication is a funnel that empties on the last screen. The subject is as much regulatory as it is product: PSD2, 3-D Secure, exemptions, bank acceptance rates.

• Choosing and ranking payment methods by basket and market
• Strong customer authentication: real friction versus fraud rate
• Pay in instalments, wallets, one-click payment
• Analysis of authorisation failures and retries

Basket and pre-checkout

The basket is where the customer does the maths. Shipping costs shown too late, uncertain availability, a promo code that won't apply: these are funnel exits often wrongly blamed on the checkout.

Returns and after-sales

A returns policy is decided before the purchase and carried out after it. A clear return journey drives sales upstream; an opaque one generates customer service contacts, which cost more than the return itself.

Marketplace

Opening a marketplace means accepting that the purchase journey is no longer entirely under your control: varying lead times, multi-seller baskets, split returns, payouts to sellers. Product trade-offs change in nature.

Beyond e-commerce

Designing apps and digital products, and IT systems consulting and support, fall under the same corporate purpose and the same methods. Purchase journeys are the ground I know best, not the only one I work on.