why people hit checkout and still don’t buy

The speaker discusses a common e-commerce problem where customers reach the checkout page but fail to complete purchases. The root cause analysis hinges on two potential issues. First, advertisers may be optimizing their sales campaigns for the wrong conversion event—such as initiate checkout or add to cart—rather than optimizing directly for purchases. This tracking mismatch means ads are being guided by incomplete conversion signals. Second, there may be technical issues breaking the actual checkout funnel itself. To diagnose which problem exists, the speaker recommends comparing the rates of customers who initiate checkout versus those who reach checkout. If the drop-off occurs at the initiate checkout stage, this indicates a checkout functionality problem, most likely related to the payment processor. The speaker recommends testing the checkout flow personally and having friends make test purchases to verify the payment processing works correctly. If instead the drop-off is at the reach checkout stage, the issue traces back to traffic quality or ad performance—a problem that originates in the advertising strategy rather than the checkout infrastructure.