The $1M problem hidden inside your checkout flow

Welcome back to the 134th edition of Nord Media

​​Not very long ago, desktop ruled everything.

• Founders would build their stores on a big screen.

• Marketers would run audits and QA flows on a laptop.

• Conversion optimizations happened in a browser window with dozens of tabs open.

But over time, traffic shifted.

Today, mobile is where most of your customers experience your brand for the first time. Yet the optimization mindset hasn’t caught up.

The result: A growing disconnect between what internal teams see during reviews and what real customers struggle with every day.

In this email, we’re breaking down one of the biggest blind spots in modern CRO:

Why optimizing only for desktop can quietly stall your growth, and how to start uncovering the deeper friction points that are buried inside the mobile journey.

Let’s dive in:

Your ads are driving traffic, but are your pages turning visitors into buyers?

Every week, the team at surefoot shares real-world A/B test results, proven CRO strategies, and practical insights to help you optimize your website and maximize your conversion rates.

No fluff. No generic advice.

Just actionable takeaways from brands doing $10MM to $200M.

👉️ Sign up now and start converting more shoppers into buyers.

Mobile is an entirely different context

There’s a common trap teams fall into: assuming that mobile optimization is just about making things smaller or stacking content vertically.

But when you look closely, mobile isn’t just a compressed version of your site. It’s a completely different use case.

Mobile users are often on the go. They’re using one hand, juggling distractions, dealing with slower Wi-Fi, and trying to complete actions quickly. 

That context creates challenges that don’t show up in a clean desktop environment.

Some common examples that hurt mobile conversion:

• Forms that look fine on desktop but overwhelm the user on mobile with 10+ fields stacked in a scroll

• Buttons that are too close together or require awkward thumb placement

• Pop-ups or modals that block the entire screen and are difficult to close

• Long product pages that bury critical information or CTAs halfway down

These friction points may seem minor in isolation, but stacked together, they chip away at the user’s momentum.

And the more cognitive effort it takes to complete a task, the more likely the user is to abandon the journey altogether.

Headline testing only gets you so far

Most CRO efforts still revolve around isolated creative tests: new hero images, headline variants, button colors.

These are easy to execute, but they often don’t move the needle. That’s because users don’t experience your site in fragments. 

They move through a sequence, and any breakdown in that sequence can kill conversion.

Instead of optimizing elements, advanced teams are starting to optimize experiences. That means looking at:

• The full path from landing page to checkout

• The product page layout and how it performs on mobile

• How upsells or cross-sells are introduced, and whether they’re intuitive or disruptive

• The post-purchase experience, including confirmation pages and follow-up CTAs

Mobile checkout usually requires over twice as many interactions as desktop.

These kinds of discoveries don’t come from running headline tests. They come from stepping back, mapping the real customer journey, and identifying where users lose momentum.

Behavioral tools help uncover what traditional analytics can’t show you

Your analytics platform can tell you where people are dropping off, but it can’t tell you why.

That’s where session recordings, heatmaps, and click tracking come in.

By observing actual user behavior, you start to spot the small but critical blockers that go unseen in traditional dashboards:

• Where users rage-click or repeatedly tap the wrong element

• How far they scroll before giving up

• Which sections they hover over or revisit

• Whether they complete fields quickly or seem confused mid-form

• When they pause unexpectedly during the checkout process

When you start analyzing this data at the journey level, especially with mobile in mind, you’ll often find patterns that challenge your assumptions.

You might realize that the layout you thought was clean is actually confusing to users.

Or that your add-to-cart button, while visible on desktop, ends up pushed too far down the page on mobile.

These aren’t issues that show up in A/B tests. They require visibility into real user interaction.

Once you see the problem clearly, fixing it becomes much more straightforward.

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Final Thoughts

Optimizing a customer experience doesn’t just mean refining the visuals or testing headlines.

It means deeply understanding what your users are going through, especially on the devices they actually use.

The biggest wins often come not from adding more to your site, but from subtracting the things that quietly push people away.

The sooner you shift from surface-level tweaks to full-journey insight, the faster your growth compounds.

Struggling to grow? My team and I can help.

HOW??

We Use Strategies and Systems that Produce Consistent Results.

We currently work with a small handful of brands from early-stage DTC startups to global brands scale smarter, grow faster and get profitable. Whether your goal rapid growth, consistency at scale or just to be profitable again, we've built systems and strategies to achieve that for hundreds of brands over the years.

The results? You get reliable and consistent growth without sacrificing your profitability.

Sound interesting and worth a conversation? Book a call

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Thank you for reading! I appreciate you.

Sincerely,
Kody

Disclaimer: Special thanks to Surefoot & TripleWhale for sponsoring today’s newsletter.