When an online store underperforms, the instinct is to blame pricing or product. In our experience rebuilding underperforming stores, the more common cause is friction in the last sixty seconds of the checkout — exactly when the customer has already decided to buy.
The most common offender is mandatory account creation before checkout. Forcing a new password and email verification at the point of purchase loses a meaningful share of otherwise-committed buyers. A guest checkout option, with account creation offered afterward, consistently performs better.
Second is payment method mismatch — building a checkout around card payments alone when a large share of customers want to pay via mobile money or on delivery. The checkout needs to reflect how people actually pay locally, not how a template assumes they pay.
Third is load time on mobile. Most traffic to Zimbabwean e-commerce stores is mobile, often on inconsistent connections, and a checkout page loaded with unoptimised images will lose customers before the page even finishes rendering.
Fourth, and easy to fix: unclear delivery cost and timeline shown only at the final step. Surfacing delivery cost earlier reduces the 'surprise fee' abandonment that shows up clearly in cart analytics.