Checkout is the one part of a product where every millisecond and every extra click has a measurable cost. When we set out to rebuild ours, the goal wasn't more features — it was fewer points of failure.
What was slowing customers down
Our previous flow made several sequential calls to price, validate, and confirm an order. Any one of them being slow made the whole flow feel slow, and any one of them failing meant the customer saw an error with no clear next step.
What changed
We collapsed pricing and validation into a single automated step, added clear inline recovery for common failures like expired payment methods, and made retries automatic instead of asking the customer to start over.
The result was a checkout that fails less often, and when it does fail, tells the customer exactly what to do next instead of leaving them stuck.
