The brief was modest: the store sold well in person and badly online. Traffic was healthy, the product photography was good, and the funnel collapsed somewhere between the bag and the payment screen.

Where the drop-off actually was

Session recordings put it beyond doubt. Shipping cost appeared for the first time on the third checkout step, after an address form, and roughly a third of shoppers left within eight seconds of seeing it.

The fix was not visual. We surfaced an estimated delivery cost in the bag, made the free-shipping threshold a live progress line, and collapsed three checkout steps into one scrollable page with a persistent summary.

The redesign shipped with a smaller component library than the site had before. Most of the improvement came from removing decisions, not adding polish.