The cruellest place to lose a sale is checkout, because the person had already decided to buy. They wanted it enough to start paying and something in the last few seconds talked them out of it.
It's almost never the product at that point. It's friction — small, specific, and far more fixable than the price.
The usual culprits
- A new domain — the checkout lives somewhere the buyer has never seen, and their guard goes up at the worst moment.
- A surprise — a fee, a forced account, a shipping field on a digital product. Anything unexpected reads as a reason to pause.
- Another load — one more page between intent and payment is one more chance to get distracted and leave.
- No reassurance — nothing that says what happens after they pay, so 'later' feels safer than 'now'.
Bringing them back
The first fix is prevention: keep checkout on the same page and brand they came from, ask for the minimum, and say plainly what happens next. The second is recovery — if you have their email, a short, friendly nudge within a day catches a real slice of the people who genuinely just got distracted.