The quiet handbrakes slowing down your checkout

Dear founder,

Very few stores lose sales in one obvious place. Instead, conversion leaks away a little at a time through small, quiet points of friction that no single person owns.

I call them handbrakes. On their own each one looks harmless. Together they're the reason a store with good traffic and good products still underperforms.

Where they hide

The usual suspects are boring, which is exactly why they survive:

• Slow first load on mobile, where most of your traffic actually is
• Surprise costs — shipping or tax that only appear at the final step
• Too many form fields, asking for things you don't need yet
• A cart that forgets what the customer was doing

Why they stick around

Nobody ships a handbrake on purpose. They accumulate — an app added here, a tweak there, a "temporary" fix that becomes permanent. Because no one change caused the problem, no one change gets blamed for it.

Friction is invisible to the people who built it and obvious to the people trying to buy.

How to find yours

You don't need a six-week audit to start. Walk your own checkout on a real phone, on real data, and note every moment you hesitate. That short list is usually worth more than any analytics dashboard.

Then fix them in priority order — highest friction, lowest effort first. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on that list, start with a FREE call.