Client overview
- Industry focus
- E-commerce
- Portfolio segment
- E-commerce
- Organization profile
- DTC apparel, ~$420M GMV, 70% mobile sessions
Paid social traffic landed on PDPs optimized for visuals, yet checkout abandonment spiked at shipping and payment steps. Cross-border shoppers saw surprise duties; CSAT suffered. Finance wanted interchange optimization without exposing brand to outage when a PSP degraded regionally.
Problem
Mobile checkout friction, address errors, cross-border surprises, and PSP outages capsized conversion and margin.
Guests retyped addresses without typeahead; AVS mismatches caused hard declines. Wallet buttons buried below fold on small screens.
FX and duty estimates arrived after shoppers committed emotionally, inflating cart bail rates. CRM retargeting spent chased users who actually wanted to buy but lacked payment options.
Monolithic PSP integration prevented smart failover when acquirers throttled transactions during flash events.
Solution
Headless checkout BFF with progressive disclosure, verified address APIs, adaptive wallet placement, orchestrated payment routing with health checks, and transparent landed cost earlier in funnel.
Edge middleware detected device class to prioritize Apple/Google Pay surfaces. Address service combined Loqate-like signals with deterministic parsing; negative tests guarded PII logs.
Duty API integration surfaced estimates on PDP for eligible corridors; messaging explained variance bands honestly to reduce disputes.
Orchestration layer routed transactions using latency + approval probability models with circuit breakers; reconciliation unified settlement files for finance.
Implementation
- 1
Experimentation hygiene
Feature flags isolated copy vs. UX changes; Bayesian analysis prevented peeking bias. Privacy review for third-party scripts tightened.
- 2
Regional pilots
EU corridor first for duty transparency; NA mobile wallet uplift tests followed. Fraud rules tuned per corridor with analyst oversight.
- 3
Operational resilience
Synthetic transactions probed PSP health every minute; graceful degradation messaging replaced silent failures.
Tools & platforms
- Shopify Hydrogen-custom hybrid
- Stripe + Adyen orchestration
- LaunchDarkly
- Snowplow behavioral events
Engineering challenges addressed
- Keeping TTFB low on headless PDP when adding estimation calls.
- Maintaining PCI scope boundaries with new client-side flows.
Program artifacts & environments
Tech stack
- Next.js
- Node.js
- GraphQL
- Redis
- Stripe
- Adyen
- AWS CloudFront
- Snowplow
- Terraform
Results
- +6.8% checkout completion rate on mobile cohort
- 22% reduction in cross-border PSP fees via smarter routing
- Return rate due to sizing unchanged — uplift attributed to UX not discounting
Quantified impact
+6.8% mobile checkout completion
Six-week experiment with holdout markets.
$11.4M incremental annual GMV
Estimated from funnel model and AOV stability.
Key takeaways
- Checkout experiments need guardrails on margin, not only conversion.
- Payment orchestration is a reliability feature — merchandising teams notice when it works.
- Transparency on duties beats surprise — even when estimates are imperfect.