Kiln & Co · E-commerce · 2022
A calmer checkout for handmade ceramics
Kiln & Co sells one-of-a-kind ceramics from 300 independent studios. Shoppers loved browsing and gave up at checkout, so I rebuilt the path from basket to order in ten weeks.
- Client
- Kiln & Co
- Role
- Product designer, freelance
- Timeline
- 10 weeks
- Platform
- Web and mobile web
- Team
- Founder, 2 engineers
- Conversion research
- Checkout design
- UI design
- A/B testing
Results
- checkout completion
- +18%
- basket abandonment on mobile
- −27%
- page checkout, down from 4
- 1
The problem
Every piece on Kiln & Co is one of a kind, which makes browsing a joy and checkout a risk: if two people want the same bowl, one of them loses. The old checkout spread over four pages, asked for an account before payment and only revealed shipping costs at the end. On mobile, 7 in 10 baskets were abandoned.
Research
I combined session recordings, a checkout survey and five moderated tests to find where people dropped off and why. Three issues accounted for most of the losses: surprise shipping costs, forced account creation and the fear that a piece would sell out while paying.
Design
- A single-page checkout with express payment at the top and the card form below, completed in one scroll on a phone.
- Shipping costs shown on the product page and in the basket, so the total never changes at the last step.
- Guest checkout by default, with an account offered after the order is placed.
- A ten-minute reservation once a piece is in the basket, shown as a quiet timer rather than an alarm.
Outcome
We ran the new checkout against the old one for four weeks. Completion rose by 18%, mobile basket abandonment fell by 27%, and support emails about pieces selling out mid-payment stopped entirely.
“Iris found the three things that were quietly costing us sales and fixed them in ten weeks. The new checkout paid for itself in the first month.”