A checkout that stopped losing carts
Client
Fernbridge Co.
Year
2022
Role
Senior Product Designer
Tools
The problem
Sellers on Fernbridge's marketplace each had different shipping and payment setups, which the checkout flow handled by branching into as many as 22 possible steps. Cart abandonment sat above 78%, well above the industry benchmark.
The process
Find the real constraints
Worked with backend engineering to understand which seller-specific logic actually needed to block checkout versus what could be resolved after payment.
Collapse to one flow
Designed a single five-step checkout that deferred seller-specific edge cases to post-purchase confirmation emails instead of blocking the buyer mid-flow.
A/B test the riskiest step
Ran a six-week test isolating just the shipping-address step, the biggest suspected drop-off point, before committing to the full rollout.
The result
Cart abandonment dropped to 54%, and average time-to-purchase fell from just under six minutes to under ninety seconds.
22 → 5
Checkout steps
-24 pts
Cart abandonment
4x
Faster time-to-purchase
Next case study
Cutting signup drop-off in half