Is a Checkout Optimisation Project Worth Paying For?
By CodexierPublished 5 min read
Checkout optimisation is sold with big promises, but whether it pays off for your shop is a matter of simple arithmetic on your own numbers. If many people start checkout and few finish, and each order carries decent margin, fixing the checkout is one of the fastest returns in e-commerce. If traffic is low or the drop-off happens earlier, the money is better spent elsewhere. This guide walks through the calculation step by step.
Find your checkout drop-off
Open GA4 or your platform's analytics and look at a funnel for the last three months: product view, add to cart, begin checkout, add shipping, add payment, purchase. Shopify and WooCommerce both report parts of this. What you want is the step where the largest share of people disappear, and the absolute number of people who begin checkout but do not buy.
- Use full months and avoid campaign spikes that distort the picture.
- Split by device. A checkout that works on desktop and fails on mobile shows up clearly this way.
- Check whether tracking is reliable. If consent settings or a payment redirect break the purchase event, the drop-off looks worse than it is.
Estimate the value of fixing it
Not every abandoned checkout is recoverable. Some visitors were comparing prices, checking shipping cost or saving the cart for later. The recoverable part comes from friction you can remove: forced account creation, surprise shipping costs, missing payment methods such as Swish or Klarna, slow pages, confusing address fields and error messages that do not say what went wrong.
Go through our checkout friction checklist and count how many of those issues your shop has. A checkout with several clear problems has much more to gain than one that already follows good practice, where a project mostly buys small refinements.
Cost of the project
A focused checkout review and fix with us starts from 9 990 kr at a fixed price; the scope is described on the conversion optimisation and checkout fix page. Add any costs on your side: time to review changes, and new fees if you add a payment method. Use the full figure in the calculation below.
Break-even calculation
- Gross margin per order: average order value minus product cost, shipping, payment fees and VAT. Use margin, not revenue.
- Break-even orders: project cost divided by gross margin per order, rounded up.
- Monthly abandoners: sessions that begin checkout but do not purchase.
- Break-even share: break-even orders divided by the abandoners you expect over the next twelve months.
- Decision: if the break-even share is small compared with the friction you found, go ahead. If it requires recovering a large part of all abandoners, do not.
| Input | How to get it | Worked example |
|---|---|---|
| Project cost | Fixed quote | 9 990 kr |
| Gross margin per order | Accounting or product margins | Three hundred kronor |
| Break-even orders | Cost divided by margin | 34 orders |
| Abandoners per year | Analytics funnel | 1,200 sessions |
| Share to recover | Break-even orders divided by abandoners | Roughly 1 in 35 |
The example is illustrative arithmetic, not a forecast. Replace every figure with your own.
Remember that a better checkout keeps working after break-even, and returning customers benefit from it too. A twelve-month horizon is conservative for a change that usually lasts until the next redesign.
When traffic is too low to justify it
If only a handful of people begin checkout each month, even a perfect checkout cannot recover enough orders to pay back. Then the bottleneck is traffic or product pages, and money is better spent on SEO, product photos or clearer pricing. The same applies if your analytics show most visitors leaving on product pages: fix the step where people actually drop.
When not to buy from us: if your calculation shows you need to recover a large share of all abandoners to break even, we will say so and suggest the cheaper fixes you can do yourself. Bring your funnel numbers to a free call and we will run the calculation with you. Other services are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
What is a normal checkout abandonment rate?
It varies too much between industries, devices and tracking setups for a benchmark to be useful. Compare your own shop over time and by device instead; a large gap between mobile and desktop is a clear signal.
Should I add more payment methods first?
If Swedish customers cannot pay with Swish or Klarna, adding them is often the single most effective change. Check the fees against your margin so the new method does not eat the gain.
How soon will I see results?
Changes that remove clear friction usually show in the numbers within a few weeks. Measure over at least one full month and compare with the same period before, adjusting for campaigns and seasons.
Do abandoned-cart emails replace checkout fixes?
No, they complement them. Emails recover some of the people who left, while checkout fixes stop people leaving in the first place. Doing both is common once the checkout itself works.
Want to know if your checkout is worth fixing?
Bring three months of funnel data and your average margin per order. In fifteen minutes we will run the break-even calculation with you and tell you honestly whether the project pays back.
Book a free 15-minute call