The shipping cost reveal that kills momentum
This is probably the most common checkout killer, and yet stores keep doing it.
Someone browses your products. Finds what they want. Adds to cart. Clicks checkout. Fills in their email. Enters their shipping address. And then—only then—do they see that shipping costs €15 when they were expecting maybe €5.
They leave. Of course they leave.
The problem isn’t necessarily that shipping is expensive. Sometimes it just costs what it costs. The problem is the surprise. People hate feeling tricked, and revealing significant costs late in the process feels like a trick even if that wasn’t your intent.
We see this constantly in stores that don’t show shipping estimates on product pages or cart. They’re worried that showing shipping costs early will discourage people from adding to cart. Maybe. But showing them late definitely discourages people from completing checkout, and that’s worse because you’ve invested more effort getting them that far.
The fix isn’t complicated. Show shipping estimates earlier. On product pages, in the cart, anywhere before they’ve committed time to filling out checkout forms. Let them decide whether the total price makes sense before they start investing effort.
If shipping genuinely varies too much to estimate, at least tell people that upfront. “Shipping calculated at checkout” is better than letting them be surprised. And if your shipping is expensive, own it and explain why. “We ship everything fully insured via DHL” gives people context that makes the cost feel justified rather than arbitrary.
The mobile form that fights you
More than half your checkout traffic is probably mobile. Yet we still see checkouts that feel like they were designed on a desktop and tested once on a phone as an afterthought.
Small tap targets that are hard to hit. Form fields that don’t trigger the right mobile keyboard—text input when you need numbers, no @ shortcut for email fields. Autocomplete that doesn’t work properly. Zoom that triggers accidentally when you’re trying to type. Error messages that appear below the fold so you don’t even see what’s wrong.
These individually are minor annoyances. Together, they make checkout feel harder than it needs to be. And when something feels hard, people give up.
The brutal reality is that if your checkout doesn’t work smoothly on mobile, you’re losing money every single day. Not because people prefer competitors, but because your own checkout is making it unnecessarily difficult for them to pay you.
Test your checkout on an actual phone. Not in the mobile view of your browser—on a real device, using your thumbs like a normal person would. Try to complete a purchase while standing up, with one hand, in mediocre lighting. That’s closer to how many of your customers are actually experiencing it.
If it’s frustrating for you, it’s definitely frustrating for them.
The account creation wall nobody asked for
Someone’s ready to buy. They’ve decided to trust you with their money. And then you tell them they need to create an account first.
Why? What purpose does forcing account creation serve at this exact moment other than adding friction?
We get it. You want customer accounts. They’re useful for marketing, for repeat purchases, for building relationships. But making them mandatory at checkout trades long-term potential for short-term conversion loss.
The best approach is guest checkout with an easy option to create an account after purchase. Let them complete the transaction first. Then, when they’re in the post-purchase good mood of having successfully bought something, offer to save their info for next time.
Some stores worry that guest checkout means losing customer data. It doesn’t. You still have their email, their order history, their preferences. You just don’t have a password. And honestly, most people would rather receive a login link via email than remember another password anyway.
Remove the friction. Let people buy from you without creating barriers they didn’t ask for.
The form fields that ask for too much
Every field you ask someone to fill out is a small barrier. Each one creates a tiny bit of friction and a tiny chance they’ll decide it’s not worth the effort.
So why are you asking for their phone number twice? Why do you need their fax number? Why does the company field matter for a personal purchase? Why are you asking for separate billing and shipping addresses when 80% of people use the same one?
We see checkouts that ask for 20+ pieces of information when 10 would do. Each extra field is costing you conversions.
The goal should be to collect the absolute minimum information necessary to complete the transaction. Anything else—marketing preferences, account details, optional information—can be gathered later or made truly optional.
Look at your checkout right now and ask for each field: “Do we absolutely need this to ship the product and process payment?” If the answer is no, remove it or make it optional. You’ll be surprised how many fields fail this test.
The error messages that don’t help
Someone fills out your checkout form. Clicks submit. Gets an error. The message says “Please correct the errors below” but doesn’t highlight which fields are wrong or what’s wrong about them.
Or worse: the error appears at the top of the page, but on mobile you’re scrolled down looking at the submit button, so you don’t even see the error. You just know it didn’t work and you don’t know why.
This seems like a small thing. It’s not. Unclear error handling is one of the biggest sources of checkout frustration we see in user testing.
Good error handling is specific: “Email address should include an @” not just “Invalid email.” It’s immediate: show the error as soon as someone leaves the field, not after they submit. It’s visible: put the error message right next to the problematic field, and make sure it’s visible without scrolling.
Bad error handling makes people feel stupid and frustrated. Good error handling makes them feel helped. The difference in conversion is measurable.
The payment options that aren’t there
You get to the payment step and the store only accepts credit cards. No PayPal. No digital wallets. No buy-now-pay-later options that are increasingly popular especially with younger shoppers.
For some customers, this is a dealbreaker. They don’t feel comfortable entering card details on a site they don’t know well. Or they prefer the buyer protection of PayPal. Or they specifically want to use Klarna to split the payment.
Different customers have different payment preferences, often for good reasons. Limiting options means limiting who can easily buy from you.
The counterargument is that too many options creates decision paralysis. Fair point. But there’s a balance between “here are 20 payment methods” and “credit card only.” Most stores should offer at least card payments and one or two popular alternative methods relevant to their market.
In Germany, that often means PayPal and Klarna at minimum. In other markets, it might be Apple Pay, Google Pay, or local payment methods. Know what your customers expect and make sure it’s available.
The migration fantasy (again)
This is often when teams start thinking about migration. The current codebase is a mess, changes are scary, velocity is slow—clearly the answer is starting fresh on a new platform with a clean slate.
We talked about this in another piece, but it’s worth repeating here: migration doesn’t fix this problem unless you also fix the behaviors that created it.
If your pattern is to ship quick fixes under pressure, you’ll do the same thing on the new platform. Within six months, you’ll start accumulating the same kind of debt. Within a year, you’ll be right back where you started, just on different infrastructure.
The platform isn’t making you ship quick fixes. Business pressure is. Lack of discipline is. Not prioritizing time to do things properly is. Those problems don’t go away when you migrate—you just spend six months and a lot of money moving them to a new environment.
Sometimes migration is the right answer. But not because it magically solves technical debt. Only because it forces you to rebuild cleanly and gives you an opportunity to establish better practices from day one.
If you’re not also fixing your processes and discipline, you’re wasting time and money on migration.
What it looks like to dig out
Getting out from under quick-fix debt isn’t fast and it isn’t glamorous. There’s no magic bullet. It’s just steady work over time, and it requires making different choices about how you handle new requests.
The first step is acknowledging the problem exists. Not vaguely—specifically. Document what you know is fragile. List the plugins that are redundant or barely used. Identify the workarounds that have been in place so long nobody remembers why.
This is uncomfortable because it makes the mess visible. Most teams would rather pretend everything’s fine and just work around the issues. But you can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge.
The second step is stopping the bleeding. This means changing how you respond to new requests. When someone asks for a quick fix, you start asking harder questions: Do we really need this? Can we solve the underlying problem properly instead? What’s the right way to build this, and why aren’t we doing that?
Sometimes the answer still is “we need the quick fix because timing matters more than perfection right now.” Fine. But make it a conscious decision, document it as technical debt, and schedule time to come back and fix it properly.
The goal isn’t to never take shortcuts. It’s to make shortcuts the exception instead of the default, and to actually pay back the debt you create.
The third step is dedicating time to cleanup. This is the part most businesses resist because it doesn’t feel productive. You’re not shipping new features. You’re not directly increasing revenue. You’re just making things less broken.
But this is exactly like maintaining a building or servicing a vehicle. You can defer it for a while, but eventually the lack of maintenance creates bigger problems that force you to stop everything and fix them anyway—just at much higher cost.
Better to schedule regular cleanup. Maybe it’s one day per sprint. Maybe it’s one week per quarter. Whatever works for your rhythm, but it needs to be consistent and protected time that doesn’t get sacrificed when other priorities emerge.
What good looks like in practice
Stores that have their technical house in order operate differently. The differences aren’t always obvious from the outside, but they’re dramatic from the inside.
Changes happen faster because the team is confident about what they’re modifying. Simple updates don’t require elaborate testing because the codebase is predictable. New features can be added without fear of unexpected interactions because the architecture is clean.
Developers can answer questions like “what will this affect?” with confidence. The team can deploy multiple times per week instead of scheduling deployments as rare, risky events. Marketing can test new ideas without requiring engineering approval for every change.
This doesn’t mean nothing ever breaks. Problems still happen. But they’re isolated, understandable, and fixable quickly because the system isn’t a fragile house of cards.
The business difference is huge. When your team isn’t afraid to deploy, you can move faster. You can test more ideas. You can respond to market changes without weeks of lead time. You can actually optimize and improve instead of just maintaining the status quo.
We’ve seen stores double their deployment frequency just by cleaning up technical debt. Same team, same platform, just a cleaner codebase that people can work with confidently.
That velocity compounds. More tests mean more learning. More learning means better decisions. Better decisions mean better outcomes. All because the team isn’t paralyzed by fear of breaking things.
The discipline that prevents the problem
The stores that avoid quick-fix accumulation don’t have better platforms or bigger budgets. They have better discipline about how they approach changes.
When a request comes in, they ask: “What’s the right way to build this?” Not the fastest way or the cheapest way, but the right way—the approach that fits cleanly into the existing architecture, that’s maintainable, that doesn’t create new dependencies or workarounds.
Sometimes the right way takes longer. Sometimes it costs more upfront. But it saves time and money long-term by not creating debt that has to be paid back later.
They also have boundaries. Not everything that could be built should be built. Sometimes the right answer is “no” or “not yet” or “let’s solve this differently.” Having the discipline to say no to bad requests is just as important as having the skill to build good solutions.
They document as they go. Not elaborate documentation that takes hours—just enough context that someone else (or their future self) can understand why decisions were made and how things work. This prevents the “I have no idea why this is here or if it’s safe to remove” problem that plagues stores with too many old fixes.
They maintain a backlog of technical debt and actually work on it. It’s not just a list where things go to die. It’s a real queue that gets regular attention, where items get prioritized and addressed before they become emergencies.
This takes discipline because it requires doing less-visible work and sometimes saying no to visible new features. That’s a hard sell when everyone wants to ship more. But it’s what prevents the slow accumulation of debt that eventually makes shipping anything feel dangerous.
Why agencies don’t always tell you this
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about our industry: quick fixes are profitable for agencies that bill hourly.
A quick fix takes less time upfront than doing it right. The client is happy because they got what they needed fast. The agency makes decent margin because the work was simple. And when that fix creates problems later? Well, that’s more billable work to fix those problems.
There’s no incentive to say “this will create technical debt that’ll cause issues in six months.” The client doesn’t want to hear that—they want the feature now. And the agency knows that in six months, either they’ll get paid to fix the new problems or the client will move to a different agency and it won’t be their problem anymore.
We’re not saying every agency operates this way. But enough do that it’s worth being aware of the dynamic.
At BrandCrock, we’ve made a deliberate choice to have these uncomfortable conversations upfront. When someone asks for a quick fix that’ll create debt, we explain the tradeoffs clearly. Sometimes they still choose the quick fix because timing matters. That’s fine—it’s their business and sometimes speed really is more important.
But we want them making that choice with full information, not discovering the consequences six months later when it’s too late to make a different decision.
This sometimes costs us work in the short term. Clients who just want the quick fix find agencies who’ll give it to them without the lecture. But the clients who appreciate the honesty tend to stick around, and those long-term relationships are better for everyone.
What this means for your store
If your team has become afraid to deploy, that’s not normal and it’s not okay. Fear of change is a symptom of accumulated technical debt that’s grown large enough to affect how your business operates.
The good news is it’s fixable. Not instantly, but steadily, if you commit to different practices and dedicate time to cleanup.
The bad news is it won’t fix itself. Left alone, technical debt grows. The codebase gets messier. Changes get riskier. Velocity slows further. Eventually you hit a crisis point where you’re forced to either do a major cleanup or migrate to start fresh.
Better to address it now while you have the luxury of doing it methodically instead of waiting until it becomes an emergency.
Start by taking inventory. What parts of your store are people afraid to touch? What changes consistently take longer than they should? Where are the workarounds and quick fixes? You probably already know the answers—you just need to write them down.
Then stop adding to the problem. When new requests come in, take the time to ask if there’s a right way to build it instead of just a fast way. Not every time—sometimes fast still matters—but more often than you currently do.
Then start scheduling cleanup time. Even a few hours per week makes a difference over months. Pick the most fragile or painful areas first and work through them systematically.
The result isn’t perfection—no codebase is perfect. But it’s a store that your team can work on confidently instead of fearfully. Where changes don’t carry mystery risks. Where deploying is routine instead of risky.
That confidence changes everything.
If you’re living in quick-fix debt
If this describes your store—if your team has become cautious about changes because too many things have broken unexpectedly—you have options.
You can keep living with it, working around the fragile parts, deploying rarely and carefully. Lots of stores operate this way for years. It’s frustrating and slow, but it’s survivable.
You can dedicate time to cleaning it up yourself if you have technical capability in-house. This takes discipline and time, but it’s absolutely doable if you’re willing to prioritize it.
Or you can bring in help specifically to address the technical debt. Not to build new features, but to clean up the existing mess, document what’s actually there, and establish better patterns going forward.
That’s work we do at BrandCrock. Not the glamorous project work that looks good in portfolios, but the unglamorous cleanup work that lets stores move confidently again. Taking the time to understand the archaeology of fixes, documenting what can be removed safely, refactoring what needs to stay, and establishing patterns that prevent the problem from recurring.
It’s not fast and it’s not cheap. But for stores where technical debt has become a real velocity problem, it’s an investment that pays back quickly in restored confidence and faster execution.
If that sounds like something you need, reach out. We’ll give you an honest assessment of what’s fixable and what it would take. And if cleanup isn’t actually what you need—if your problems are elsewhere—we’ll tell you that too.
Because the goal isn’t selling you a service. It’s helping you get to a place where your store works for you instead of against you. Where changes feel safe instead of scary. Where your team can move fast because the foundation is solid.
That’s what stores should feel like. And it’s achievable, even if right now it doesn’t seem like it.
brandcrock_admin
Jan. 28, 2026
