Checkout design balances completeness (collect what fulfilment needs) with minimal friction (drop nothing the shopper does not need to provide). Every step is a conversion opportunity.
- Define the steps your business needs
List every piece of data Checkout must collect (billing, shipping, payment, purchase order, gift options). Combine steps that share context; split steps that have unrelated data.
- Integrate payment and tax services
Configure Salesforce Payments or your chosen payment processor. Integrate Vertex or Avalara for tax. Test in sandbox with real transactions before going live.
- Configure inventory and fraud screening
Inventory check at the right step (typically before payment). Fraud screening before Order creation. Both integrate through the Cart Calculator framework.
- Design the mobile Checkout experience
Mobile Checkout drives more of e-commerce every year. Test on real devices; broken mobile Checkout is the single biggest e-commerce defect.
- Build post-checkout flows
Confirmation email, OMS handoff, fulfilment trigger, inventory decrement. The Order lifecycle continues post-checkout; design those flows alongside the Checkout itself.
- Slow third-party service calls drop conversion. Monitor latency on tax, fraud, and payment integrations.
- Show validation errors progressively, not all at once. A wall of errors at submit kills conversion.
- Mobile Checkout breaks easily without dedicated testing. Test on real iPhone and Android, not just browser dev tools.
- Order creation should be atomic. If post-checkout actions fail (confirmation email, OMS handoff), the Order should still exist; do not roll back the order on downstream failure.