How I brought checkout completion from 41% to 79%
2026 · Novu · Mobile Commerce App
Introduction
Novu is a lifestyle shopping app for independent brands. They came to me about eight months after their initial launch, when the product was stable but growth had stalled. I worked embedded with their small product team over three months, owning research and design end to end.
The brief was vague at first: "something feels off in the purchase flow." That turned out to be an understatement.
The Problem
The team had a decent volume of users adding items to their cart. What they didn't have was people actually buying them. Checkout completion sat at 41%, and nobody had dug into why.
I pulled session data from Mixpanel and mapped every step between "Add to cart" and "Order confirmed." The drop was not spread evenly across the flow. It was concentrated in two places: the moment users hit the account creation wall before checkout, and the payment screen, where the form asked for card details manually with no saved options.
Three quick user interviews confirmed what the numbers were already pointing to. People wanted to try the app before committing to an account. And on payment, most of them had already given up before finishing the form.
Solution
The core change was removing the account requirement from the path to purchase. Guest checkout became the default. Users could complete an order with just an email, and an account would be created in the background.
Added Apple Pay and Google Pay as the primary options, with manual card entry moved to a secondary position. This alone cut several steps for the majority of users.
The shipping cost issue was simpler to fix but just as important. I moved the estimate to the cart screen, calculated dynamically based on the user's saved or detected location. No more surprises at the end.
Compressed the confirmation flow from five screens to two. Order summary and confirmation on one screen, post-purchase upsell on another.
Results
Checkout completion went from 41% to 79% in the first four weeks after launch. Cart abandonment dropped by roughly half. The team also saw a 22% increase in repeat purchases over the following quarter, which they attributed partly to the guest accounts converting, since those users were now in the system and receiving post-purchase emails for the first time.