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Globally, more than 70% of customers drop off before completing their purchase. In categories like travel, that number soars to 98%. Even fashion brands regularly face over 75% abandonment. But here’s the thing: this isn’t just about shopping carts. It’s about everything that goes into getting a customer to the checkout…only to lose them right before the finish line.
We’ve seen this story play out across industries. That’s why we built Checkout 2.0 – a completely reimagined payment experience designed not just to accept payments, but to convert intent into revenue.
Why the Last Step Matters More Than Ever
Most marketing strategies focus on how to get customers in. But if your checkout isn’t built to match that effort, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket.
When customers drop off at checkout, the damage runs deeper than lost orders:
- You lose the money you spent to acquire that customer.
- You miss out on buyers who were ready, willing, and just seconds away from paying.
- You break a moment of trust that’s hard to win back.
Now imagine this happening across hundreds or thousands of sessions each month. The impact isn’t just on today’s revenue; it’s on your customer lifetime value, retention, and brand perception.
Checkout is no longer a utility. It’s your conversion engine.
Why Do Customers Drop Off at Checkout?
Abandonment doesn’t happen because of one big reason. It happens because of many small ones that stack up to break the experience.
It often begins with payment failures. A customer is ready to pay, but the OTP doesn’t arrive, or it times out, or the gateway simply fails. UPI glitches are less frequent these days, but when they do occur, they’re enough to make the customer quit. Most won’t try again—they’ll just leave.
Then there’s the mobile experience. The majority of shoppers today browse and buy on their phones. But mobile checkouts often load slowly, have tiny buttons, or force users to type endlessly on small screens. By the time they get to payment, the frustration has already set in.
Even if the design looks fine, speed still matters. The expectation is instant. It feels broken when a step lags or a page takes too long to load, and intent is lost in those wasted seconds.
Next comes friction in the flow. One of the easiest ways to lose customers is to make them register an account when all they want to do is make a purchase. Introducing them to unnecessary form fields, confusing address entry, or hidden shipping costs revealed at the last moment, and abandonment rates climb even higher.
Finally, there’s trust. Checkout is a critical step where customers hand over sensitive information. Their confidence is shaken if they’re redirected to an unfamiliar page, can’t find their preferred payment option, or don’t see the security cues they expect. Without trust, the sale doesn’t happen.
Introducing Checkout 2.0: Built for Conversions
At Cashfree, we’ve powered over ₹80,000 crore in payments. We’ve seen what works, what breaks, and what it really takes to create a checkout that customers complete, not abandon. With Checkout 2.0, we’ve gone back to the drawing board to completely rethink what the checkout experience should look like in 2025.
It’s built on four core pillars that solve the very problems we’ve seen break conversions for years.
Intelligence That Converts Proactively
Checkout 2.0 is designed to think ahead of your buyers. Using AI-powered personalisation, it detects and surfaces your customer’s most preferred payment method, instantly saving them time. With PayFast, even your repeat buyers get a faster experience as their details are auto-filled in a single tap.
Offers are applied automatically, so your customers don’t waste time hunting for coupons. In case of a payment failure, like a failed UPI or card attempt, Smart Retry jumps in, suggesting alternate payment options to recover the transaction in real time. If a customer still drops off, intelligent nudges on WhatsApp, SMS, or email help bring them back.
Payment Infrastructure You Can Rely On
Behind the scenes, Checkout 2.0 is built to handle the unpredictability of Indian payments. Multi-gateway routing ensures there’s always a fallback if one gateway struggles, while our in-house UPI switch prevents drops from ever reaching the customer.
We’ve also built advanced incident management, so failures are logged, rerouted, and resolved without manual intervention. Add to that native OTP with auto-read and auto-submit, and repeat payments become effortless. Tokenisation keeps every transaction secure, and together these improvements reduce failures by nearly 25% across UPI and cards.
An Experience That Builds Trust
Checkout should feel effortless and trustworthy. This is why Checkout 2.0 loads in under 200 milliseconds, finishes in less than 30 seconds, and keeps the entire flow on your domain. A Cashfree trust badge reassures buyers that payments are secure, while subtle social proofing cues like “200+ customers paid successfully today” build confidence at just the right moment.
For merchants, the experience is fully customisable, whether it’s embedding your own branding, adapting to festive seasons with dynamic themes, or ensuring consistency across devices. The result: a checkout that looks and feels like part of your brand, while quietly reinforcing trust.
Every Payment Method in One Integration
Checkout 2.0 gives customers 180+ ways to pay, like UPI, cards, EMI, BNPL, wallets, and 140+ international currencies, while giving businesses a single, clean API integration to manage it all.
Plus, fraud is kept in check with RiskShield AI, which filters prepaid fraud and chargebacks in real time. Be it high-ticket EMI purchases, festive shopping spikes, or global customers paying in their local currency, the platform adapts without adding complexity.
Use Cases Across Industries
Every business has its own checkout challenges. Checkout 2.0 adapts to each.
For D2C and eCommerce brands, we created One-Click Checkout (OCC). What usually takes seven steps and close to two minutes is reduced to just three taps and around 30 seconds. With address fields pre-filled 85% of the time, preferred payment modes are automatically shown, offers are applied without effort, and buyers complete orders in record time. Plus, the Smart COD stack helps reduce fake orders while nudging customers from cash to prepaid.
For BFSI, imports, and regulated industries, we built Workflows as a Platform. These are payment journeys where compliance matters just as much as speed. Checkout 2.0 collects KYC details before payment, allows one-time or recurring mandates in the same flow, runs built-in AML and sanctions checks, and adapts form fields dynamically depending on the user or product. All of this is fully hosted by Cashfree, but appears as your own branded platform.
Turning the Last Step Into Your Growth Engine
Checkout is not just about collecting payments. It’s about creating a moment that defines whether your visitor becomes a customer, a repeat buyer, and eventually, an advocate.
With Checkout 2.0, you reduce abandonment and transform it into business growth. You build confidence and create an experience that customers want to return to.
Because the last step should never be where you lose them, it should be the reason they choose you again and again.
Ready to Turn Checkout Into Your Growth Engine? Book a quick demo call to see Checkout 2.0 in action and learn how to recover lost conversions, improve success rates, and make every customer journey count.
