Most conversion advice skips straight to checkout. Fix your cart abandonment, streamline your payment flow, add express checkout. And yes — all of that matters. But there’s a step that comes before any of it that most people never audit: can your customer actually find the thing?
If your best product is buried three categories deep, or sitting on a page that requires a customer to know what they’re looking for before they can find it, you’ve got a friction problem that no amount of checkout optimisation will fix. The customer who can’t find the product doesn’t abandon the cart. They just leave. Quietly. You never see them go.
Finding is half the journey
Think about how your customers actually shop, not how you’ve organised your inventory. Someone landing on your homepage for the first time doesn’t know your range. They’re not going to click through every category to find something they didn’t know they wanted. You have about three seconds and one scroll to show them something worth staying for.
That’s why your best product — the one that sells consistently, the one people come back for, the one you’d lead with if you had thirty seconds to explain your shop — belongs on your homepage. Not buried in a grid of everything. Featured. With an add to cart button right there.
Categories are the next lever. And this is where most product-based businesses get it completely wrong — they organise by what the product is rather than what the customer needs.
Take balloon businesses. Almost every balloon website I’ve ever looked at organises by product type: organic arch, three balloons on a weight, balloon column. That’s inventory logic. That’s how the supplier catalogue is organised. But the customer landing on that website isn’t thinking “I need an organic arch.” She’s thinking “I need a Moana party.” She wants to see: here are your options for a Moana party, here’s what they cost, here’s how to book.
The business that organises by party theme — by the customer’s occasion, not the product category — wins that customer before the competitor’s homepage has even loaded. Same balloons. Completely different navigation. One of them requires the customer to already understand the product range. The other meets her where she is.
Ask yourself: are my categories organised around how I think about my products, or how my customer thinks about what she needs? They’re often not the same thing. And for some ranges — small, tightly curated, where everything is visible at once — the answer might be no categories at all. A clean grid that lets the products speak for themselves beats a navigation structure that gets in the way.
Then the checkout
Once they’ve found it, every additional step is a door that a percentage of people won’t walk through. Not because they don’t want the product — because friction compounds, and at some point the effort stops feeling worth it.
Guest checkout is non-negotiable. Forcing account creation before purchase is one of the most reliably documented causes of cart abandonment. The customer doesn’t want a relationship with your login system. They want the thing they came to buy.
A one-step checkout — or as close to it as your platform allows — removes the sense of a long process ahead. Tools like Stripe Link, which saves card details for returning customers and leverages the fact that millions of people already have their details stored there, can reduce checkout to a single confirmation for a significant portion of your buyers. That’s not a small thing. That’s the difference between a purchase and an abandoned cart.
The challenge
Go to your website right now as if you’re a customer who’s never been there before. Find your most popular product. Add it to cart. Check out.
Count the clicks.
Then ask yourself honestly: does each one earn its place? Is there a step in the finding or the buying that exists because of how your backend is set up rather than because it helps your customer? That’s the one to fix first.
What did you find? Come and tell us in the group.
Want to do these challenges with a group of women who are actually doing the work? Join us — Women. Not Doing Business Alone.