I rounded up and spoke to some of the team here at Door4 that handle this sort of issue regularly. We start with William Sharp, Account Manager for some of our biggest e-commerce clients, who had a lot to say on the topic (a LOT): “Pumping more traffic into the machine is no use if the machine itself is not functioning at full capacity. All you’ll do is lose more sales faster.”
That’s the starting point for any pre-surge preparation. Before you increase spend, check what happens to the customers you’re already sending. Sounds easy, right?
Ask anyone who watches checkout behaviour closely and the same culprits come up. Thijs Bijl, is CRO Specialist here at Door4, and sees them consistently: “Unexpected extra costs appearing late in checkout, forced account creation with no guest option, and personal detail fields that aren’t necessary to complete the purchase.”
Each one shares the same problem: they introduce friction at the moment a customer has already decided to buy. At low volume, some of them drop off and come back. During a surge, most of them don’t.
The fix for forced account creation is simple, Thijs told me: “You can check out as a guest, no account needed.” Not implied, not buried in small text. Say it clearly, early, where people can see it. I don’t know about you, but more and more these days, not everyone (me) wants an account for a quick purchase; that’s the reality in 2026.
Kieran Priest, our trusty Project Manager, makes a similar case for the checkout button itself: changing “Checkout” to “Checkout securely” costs nothing and quietly removes a hesitation point that many customers won’t consciously articulate but will act on. Your checkout should be secure, so those aren’t fake promises, right?
The words inside a checkout flow are easy to overlook because they feel functional. Spoiler: They are functional – but they’re also the voice of the brand at the moment it matters most.
“Micro-copy needs to be trust-affirming but not overwhelming. Copy needs to keep pushing the user through steps without any capacity to confuse or distract – a gentle trust nudge through the final part of the process.” Says William.
Kieran added two more that work well together: stock levels (“How many items left”) to create honest urgency, and a short returns line (“Free returns within 14 days”) to reduce what he calls commitment anxiety. Both are short. Both are doing real commercial work to ease the customer’s mind.
The key word in both cases is short. A checkout is not the place to explain your returns policy in full. It’s the place to confirm, in a single line, that the customer is protected.
There’s a version of trust signalling that’s checkbox thinking – drop in a padlock icon, add some card logos, move on. That’s basic. The signals that noticeably change behaviour tend to be specific to the purchase being made.
Thijs: “Free returns, no questions asked. This removes most of the risk of purchasing.” For higher-priced seasonal items – garden furniture, outdoor living, anything where a customer is committing real money – that removal of risk is worth more than any badge.
The example from Door4’s own client work is PaintNuts. Their Colour Match Guarantee was real and meaningful, but it was buried. When Door4 surfaced it visibly in the checkout flow, conversion rates increased by up to 15%. William saw a similar dynamic with a different client: a money-back guarantee icon, placed specifically at the point where customers were visibly hesitating over a custom product, “heavily increased checkout completion rate for those who were clearly worried about the feasibility of the product.”
The trust signal worked because it was relevant to the specific doubt the customer had at that specific moment. A generic secure-payment badge doesn’t do that. A guarantee that addresses the exact risk the customer is sitting with does.
Pre-summer brings its own pressure to add countdown timers, low-stock warnings, and promotional messaging. Some of it is useful. Some of it erodes the brand it’s supposed to be serving.
“Tying a sale to a real event – like an Easter sale – makes it feel more legit and less pushy, because there’s a clear, natural reason and end date.” Says Thijs. That legitimacy matters. Urgency that has a credible reason behind it lands differently to urgency that’s manufactured.
William goes further on where promotional messaging belongs in the flow: “Discount and low-stock reminders should, for me, ideally live outside of the checkout flow. By now, the customer is committed and doesn’t need overt clutter complicating what should be a smooth final element of the journey.” If there’s a push to add at checkout, he suggests something process-led rather than promotional: free delivery, framed as part of completing the order rather than a last-ditch incentive.
BNPL and digital wallets have moved from nice-to-have to expected for many e-commerce customers. Thijs sees a clear split by order value, often “Buy Now, Pay Later – like Klarna or Clearpay – for higher-priced items. Apple Pay for lower-priced items.” The logic holds for home and garden here specifically, where basket sizes vary significantly, and a garden set at £800 sits in very different psychological territory to a set of planters at £60.
But the payment section is also where operational decisions show up as trust problems. William is direct: “An ugly or mis-implemented payment gateway can erode trust at a crucial point, where the impact is heightened during surge times.” The gateway needs to be stress tested before traffic spikes, not during them. “Having to fix a checkout during peaks is literally watching money fly by you.” Nobody wants that.
The post-surge review matters as much as the preparation. William points to three metrics he’d take to a CEO: overall site traffic as the leading indicator, conversion rate and checkout completion (which typically drops during high-traffic periods – a smaller drop than usual signals the checkout held up), and add-to-basket rate. That last one sits between acquisition and conversion: if ATB is strong but CVR falls away, the problem is in the checkout. If both drop together, the problem starts earlier.
Getting those three numbers tells you where the work goes next season.
Contributors: Thijs Bijl, CRO Specialist; Kieran Priest, Project Manager; William Sharp, Account Manager – all Door4.
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