DULUTH TRADING / E-COMMERCE CHECKOUT
Designing Checkout
for Completion & Recovery
Using behavioral data to identify where customers were failing — and designing a more resilient checkout experience that helps them complete their purchase.
CHECKOUT — PROPOSED EXPERIENCE
A checkout experience that accumulated friction over time.
Over time, the checkout had grown around business and technical requirements. Customers carried the cost: long pages, competing priorities, and little support when a transaction failed.
01 · SHOPPING CART / PRODUCTION
02 · SHIPPING / PRODUCTION
03 · BILLING / PAYMENT / PRODUCTION
Not all friction had the same impact.
I analyzed 1.2M checkout sessions to distinguish highly visible usability issues from friction that was actually associated with abandonment.
1.2M
checkout sessions analyzed
28.8%
checkout abandonment
66.6%
of checkout traffic was mobile
+29.7%
higher payment-stage abandonment on mobile vs. desktop
PAYMENT DECLINE
4.56× more common among abandoners
MOBILE HORIZONTAL SCROLLING
High volume, but no meaningful association with abandonment
PREVALENCE ≠ IMPACT
Customers weren’t simply abandoning. They were struggling to recover.
The opportunity wasn’t simply to prevent checkout errors. It was to design a checkout that could preserve purchase intent when transactions failed.
15,527
customers clicked Submit Order but failed to complete
$1.39M
high-intent cart value exposed
43%
attempted to recover after the failure
Purchase intent · Submit order · Transactional failure · Recovery attempt · Complete or abandon
Designing a checkout that can recover.
The proposed direction focused the critical path while treating recovery as a first-class part of the transaction—not an edge case.
SIMPLIFY
Reduce cognitive load and remove non-essential decisions from the critical purchase path.
GUIDE
Make progression, validation, system status, and next actions obvious.
RECOVER
Preserve customer input and provide clear paths forward when something fails.
Turning the strategy into a more focused checkout.
A proposed design direction for cart, shipping, and payment.
01 / CART
Make the path to purchase unmistakable.
Simplified visual hierarchy. Checkout prioritized above discovery. Order total clarified. Express pay made secondary but accessible.
EXISTING PRODUCTION UI
PROPOSED DESIGN DIRECTION
02 / SHIPPING
Reduce the perceived effort of the form.
Contact and address grouped clearly. Address autocomplete made prominent. Delivery options easy to compare. CTA kept close to the completed task.
EXISTING PRODUCTION UI
PROPOSED DESIGN DIRECTION
03 / PAYMENT
Clarify payment without creating uncertainty.
Card fields organized around mental models. Wallets integrated logically. Billing behavior made explicit. Review Order separates review from charge.
EXISTING PRODUCTION UI
PROPOSED DESIGN DIRECTION
DESKTOP PAYMENT — PROPOSED DESIGN DIRECTION
Experience the proposed checkout flow.
Move through cart, shipping, payment, and recovery states in the working prototype. The direction shown here is exploratory and has not been presented as a shipped experience.
Different failures need different recovery paths.
PROPOSED RECOVERY MODEL — Failure states were designed as part of the checkout flow, with the response matched to what the customer could do next.
01 / CORRECTABLE
Help customers fix exactly what’s wrong.
Invalid or incomplete card information. Inline validation, a specific error message, the exact field highlighted, and all other information preserved.
CORRECTABLE — PAYMENT DETAILS
02 / RECOVERABLE
Preserve progress through temporary failure.
Payment or submission interruption. Preserve entered information, explain what happened plainly, provide Try Again, and offer another payment option.
RECOVERABLE — PRESERVE PROGRESS
03 / BLOCKING
Keep purchase intent intact when payment fails.
Card declined by the issuer. Explain the decline clearly, keep cart and customer data, allow another card, and offer alternate payment.
BLOCKING — ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT
A clearer path from intent to completion.
Cart · Shipping · Payment · Error recovery · Review & confirm
CART
SHIPPING
PAYMENT
ERROR RECOVERY
REVIEW & CONFIRM
DESKTOP REVIEW & CONFIRMATION
Protecting high-intent transactions.
The analysis reframed checkout optimization from simply reducing friction to protecting customer intent when transactions fail.
$1.39M
high-intent cart value associated with failed Submit Order sessions
43%
attempted to recover after failure
$539K
cart value associated with active recovery attempts
Retrospective behavioral analysis. Proposed redesign shown as a design direction and not presented as a measured shipped outcome.
