Online shop relaunch in Germany, planned from the checkout

Where an aging shop loses orders

Many orders get lost after the buyer has picked a product, in the cart and the checkout. Baymard Institute puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22 percent, calculated from 50 studies (Baymard Institute, updated September 2025).

Some of the reasons lie in the shop system itself: an account it forces on the buyer, a total it shows only at the last step, a payment module nobody updated, a checkout that breaks on a phone. A relaunch can remove these. On the same page Baymard counts 23.48 form elements in the average US checkout flow. Count the fields in your own checkout before our call.

The checkout leak table

The left columns list the reasons that US online shoppers gave Baymard for leaving a checkout, among those who left for a reason other than browsing. The right columns show what I check in your shop for each reason and what the relaunch changes. Your own analytics show which rows apply to you.

Reason buyers give	Share	What I check in your shop	What the relaunch changes
Extra costs too high	40%	Where shipping costs and fees first appear	Shipping costs shown on the product page and in the cart
No trust in the site with card details	19%	The payment page on a phone, the imprint and the return terms	Payment methods buyers know, imprint and terms one click away
Account required	18%	Whether a guest can order	Guest checkout, account offered after the order
Checkout too long or complicated	17%	Number of steps and form fields	Only the fields the order needs
Errors or crashes	17%	Error logs and failed payments per method	A test order per payment method before the switch and after each update
Total not visible upfront	12%	The step where the final price appears	The total with tax and shipping in the cart
Too few payment methods	9%	The methods offered against the ones buyers ask for	The methods your buyers use

The baseline before the switch

A relaunch without numbers from the old shop cannot show whether it worked. Before the switch I record these figures per week, split by phone and desktop:

1. Visits that put a product into the cart.
2. Carts that reach the checkout.
3. Checkouts that end in a paid order.
4. Failed payments per payment method.
5. Orders from visitors who came through Google.

After the switch the same five numbers tell you what the new shop changed.

What I built in e-commerce

At Valentins, an e-commerce company that belonged to Burda Digital at the time, I led projects and built shopping carts, order funnels and dedicated mobile shops, and I ran the conversion optimization of the shops next to the programming. My page on conversion optimization quotes the result on mobile devices:

I managed to increase the sales of a top eCommerce brand by up to 22% on mobile devices through changes to the funnels.

Details: Experienced in conversion optimization.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, based in Frankfurt, and I have worked in web development for more than twenty years. I hold the Google Analytics and the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certifications, and I have set up and run Linux servers and AWS infrastructure for web portals. Details: Web development.