When “Place Order” Plays Hard to Get

Jun 19

Industry: Retail / Ecommerce
Focus Area: Checkout Funnel Drop-off & Payment Failures
Platform: Desktop + Mobile

🛠 The Setup

A national retail brand was hyped about its new checkout experience.
Shiny. Streamlined. Supposed to convert like a dream.

Instead?

Users were clicking around like they were trying to find the light switch in a blackout.

👀 What We Saw

Let’s break down the drama:

1. Dead Click Central
About 1 in 5 users tried clicking something that didn’t actually do anything. (White space? Fake buttons? Who knows. Ghost town.)

2. Mobile Meltdown
Drop-off on mobile was nearly 10% higher than desktop. That’s a lot of would-be shoppers just... leaving.

3. Payment Purgatory
Some users who chose Apple Pay or PayPal ran into bugs. The “Place Order” button ghosted them, or they got bounced back to the top of the page like it was a loop from hell.

📉 The Fallout

1 in 4 users who tried Apple Pay or PayPal never made it through
That’s over 5% of the total checkout population silently exiting
Bonus chaos: some users even got bounced between old and new checkout flows like they were in a checkout multiverse

🔧 The Fixes We Pitched

✅ Kill the dead clicks
✅ Clean up payment panel behavior — make sure buttons stick around
✅ Stop sending users through parallel universes mid-checkout
✅ Align mobile UX with actual mobile behavior (not desktop copy-paste)

🌸 Why It Matters

Checkout is your closing moment — not the time to improvise.

You want users to feel like:

“Boom. Done. That was smooth.”

Not:

“Did I just get scammed by my own cart?”

Need a second pair of eyes on your funnel?
Let’s spot the blind spots before they cost you.

Metric Bloom https://metricbloom.io