Where E-Commerce Loses Customers: From Advertising to Checkout and Payment

When e-commerce sales start to slow, advertising is often the first thing teams check. They look at ROAS, CPA, targeting, creative, and media spend to see what might be going wrong.

But the problem may start after the click.

Even a strong campaign cannot turn traffic into sales if users land on a slow website, struggle to find what they need, face a complicated checkout, or cannot complete payment.

There are several steps between an ad click and a completed purchase. Looking at the full journey helps businesses see whether the issue comes from advertising or from what happens after the user reaches the website.

Why Good Advertising Does Not Guarantee a Sale

Marketing teams usually evaluate advertising through CTR, CPC, CPA, ROAS, and other performance metrics. These numbers show how efficiently campaigns attract users, but they don’t always explain why those users don’t buy.

A relevant ad cannot compensate for:

• slow page loading;
• confusing navigation;
• incomplete product information;
• a complicated checkout;
• payment issues;

Advertising platforms are also becoming increasingly automated. Google Performance Max, Meta Advantage+, automated bidding, and AI-based optimization can help platforms find relevant audiences and optimize delivery.

What they cannot do is make a retailer’s website load faster, simplify a checkout form, add missing product information, or fix a difficult payment process.

More Data Does Not Always Give a Clearer Picture

Most e-commerce businesses already have access to large amounts of data from different systems:

• Google Ads;
• Meta Ads;
• GA4;
• CRM systems;
• payment platforms;
• internal reports;
• call-tracking systems;

The problem is that these sources often describe different parts of the customer journey.

Marketing teams work with campaign metrics and conversions. Sales or e-commerce teams monitor orders. Finance looks at payments. Product teams analyze website behavior.

Each team may have accurate data but still see only one part of the purchase journey.

This can happen when:

• users add products to the cart but do not start checkout;
• customers place orders but do not complete the payment;
• GA4 reports conversions, but the CRM shows lower revenue;

At MixDigital, we often see teams work with accurate data but focus only on their part of the process. Marketing optimizes advertising, the product team works on the website, and finance tracks payments. But no one has a complete view of the customer journey. This is why connected analytics can give e-commerce businesses a real competitive advantage.

To understand where potential customers drop off, businesses need to look at the entire journey after a user lands on the website. This is often where customers run into barriers that stop them from completing a purchase.

Where E-Commerce Customers Drop Off After the Click 

After heading to the website, a potential customer usually moves through several stages:

• landing or category page;
• product page;
• cart;
• checkout;
• payment;

Each stage can create a reason to leave.

For example:

• the page loads too slowly, so the user closes it;
• the ad leads to the wrong product, so the user does not want to search again;
• the product page lacks essential information, so the purchase is postponed;
• checkout requires too many fields, so the user stops before completing the order;
• a familiar payment method is unavailable, so the customer buys elsewhere;

By this point, the business has already paid to bring the user to the site but has not made a sale. Traffic volume alone therefore says little about e-commerce performance if the website cannot turn those visits into completed purchases. 

UX as a Revenue Factor

For e-commerce, user experience directly affects conversion, average order value, and the share of completed orders. That is why UX should be evaluated not only in terms of interface design, but also by how it affects user behavior.

Good UX helps customers quickly find answers to key questions:

• What is this product?
• Why is it right for me?
• How much does delivery cost?
• When will I receive my order?
• Can I trust this store?
• How can I pay for my purchase?

When users have to make extra effort to find these answers, the risk of losing them increases quickly. That is why a UX audit should look beyond visual appeal and focus on business metrics such as conversion rate, average order value, completed orders, and cart abandonment.

For most online stores, UX is no longer just a design issue. It directly affects business performance. Every extra step, unclear message, or delay during checkout can reduce the chances of completing a purchase.

Checkout: One of the Most Expensive Points of Conversion Loss

A customer who has already added a product to the cart is much closer to purchase than someone who has only visited the website.

That makes checkout a particularly costly place to lose them.

Common barriers include:

• mandatory account creation;
• difficult data entry on mobile;
• unexpected delivery costs;
• a complicated payment process;
• missing familiar payment methods;

Every additional action gives the customer another opportunity to stop.

An effective checkout should follow three key principles:

1. Simplicity
Customers should be able to complete an order in as few steps as possible.

2. Clarity
Customers should understand all purchase terms before they reach the payment stage.

3. Flexibility
Customers should be able to choose the payment method that works best for them.

Support for Apple Pay, Google Pay, installment or buy-now-pay-later options, and other commonly used payment methods can help reduce incomplete purchases and improve conversion rates.

Modern payment providers make it easier for businesses to offer these options and give customers a faster and more convenient way to pay.

Why E-Commerce Needs an Integrated Approach

Advertising, the website, analytics, and payment infrastructure work as one system. If one part creates friction for customers, it can reduce the return from everything else.

Many companies try to grow sales by increasing their advertising budget. But if users face barriers on the website or struggle to complete a payment, more traffic only increases the losses that are already there. For e-commerce, the focus should not only be on bringing in more visitors, but on converting the traffic you already have more effectively. The biggest opportunity for revenue growth is often in improving the journey from click to purchase.

Vadym Slavinskyi

Head of Digital Buying, Data & Analytics, MixDigital

Key Takeaway

More sales do not always require more traffic. When advertising, analytics, UX, checkout, and payments work together, e-commerce businesses can convert more of the demand they already pay to attract without increasing media spend at the same pace.

The first step is to understand exactly where customers leave the journey and fix that point before investing more in acquisition.

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