Five stages. Every one breaks differently.
A shopper's path from landing to thank-you page runs through five surfaces. Each surface has its own failure modes, its own conversion math, and its own audit pattern. Most agencies treat the storefront as a single deliverable. We treat each stage as its own product line.
Faceted nav, sort logic, product grid density, pagination versus infinite scroll. Where shoppers leave first when the catalog doesn't help them narrow.
- 01Filters that don't match catalog reality
- 02Sort orders that bury margin
- 03Mobile grids that hide too much
Variant selection, inventory clarity, shipping previews, review treatment, photography lazy-loading. Where conversion gets won or lost at the item level.
- 01Variant selectors that don't update price
- 02"In stock" claims that mislead
- 03Review widgets that block LCP
- 04Photo galleries that fight the fold
Predictive results, synonym handling, misspelling recovery, zero-result handling.
- 01Search that misses obvious matches
- 02No recovery for typos
- 03Results that don't match the catalog filter logic
Quantity edits, line-item promotions, shipping previews, save-for-later, cross-sells without overreach.
- 01Cart drawer that breaks on quantity update
- 02Shipping estimates that don't match checkout
- 03Abandoned-cart triggers that fire too late
Address validation, payment method routing, guest versus account, error recovery, mobile-respectful form design.
- 01Shipping zones that mismatch tax
- 02Payment fallback chains with no graceful failure
- 037+ form fields where 3 would do
Carts break loudly. Any change to a store can impact the cart.
Every theme update, every plugin install, every payment gateway change can break the cart. The cart is downstream of every decision made elsewhere in the store, which means it's the surface most likely to fail when something seemingly unrelated ships.
A cart that doesn't update quantity correctly, a shipping estimate that disagrees with checkout, a coupon field that silently fails — these aren't edge cases. They're the median Standard Fix. We've shipped enough cart fixes to recognize them on sight.
We built a store with a custom accordion checkout — empty server to live store — in two months.
Sequential reveal — shipping info confirmed before payment opens, payment confirmed before review. Each step verified before the next becomes available, with full back-navigation and clean state preservation. PayTrace integration, F-prefixed sequential order numbers, Mailgun on a custom subdomain, full tracking and CFD fulfillment integration. Live on day one.
Most checkouts ship as default platform UI with a logo dropped on top. That's fine until conversion starts mattering. When it does, custom checkout is the difference between losing the sale at step three and closing it.