The checkout map that stops at the happy path
This post was originally written for Breakthrough Commerce by Founder and CEO, Jamie Huskisson.
Every checkout team I’ve sat with has a version of the same diagram. Browse, basket, payment, confirmation. Someone’s drawn it on a whiteboard or built it in Miro, and every screen in it has been tested, timed, and argued over. It’s a good map. It’s also missing most of the checkout.
Almost nobody draws the other one: the map of what the customer sees when something doesn’t go to plan. The card gets declined. The item’s gone from stock between basket and payment. The delivery postcode can’t be served. Buy now, pay later says no. Those screens exist in every checkout I’ve ever looked at, and almost none of them have been through the same scrutiny as the happy path, because almost nobody thinks of them as part of the checkout at all. They’re treated as edge cases, which is another way of saying nobody’s job.
The unhappy path is the missing step in ecommerce checkout optimisation
Working out which CMS is running a site by deliberately breaking something is one of my favourite habits. Trigger a 404, fail a payment on purpose, throw an odd character into a search box. More often than not it’s still the platform’s default red or green, chosen in the rush to launch and never revisited, which usually means a development company built the site rather than a designer. Developers stay close to what the CMS ships with, and the screens that only appear when something’s gone wrong are exactly the ones the default was never built to handle well. That’s usually the difference between good design and great design: whether anyone considered the failure case, not just the success case. Design only for the version where everything works, and you can’t see what’s stopping it from working for someone else.
The decline screen nobody’s looked at in years was one version of this, forced into the open by regulation. Since 15 July, BNPL providers have to run affordability checks on every transaction, so more customers than ever are hitting a screen that used to be rare enough to ignore. That gave a lot of teams a reason to finally open a screen they’d never touched, but it’s easy to fix that one and mark the whole category done. It isn’t. BNPL just happens to be the screen with a deadline attached. The others don’t have one, which is exactly why they’re still untouched.
Take the stock mismatch: an item shows as available, the customer gets to payment, and it’s gone. That’s not a rare bug, it’s what inventory sync lag looks like on a busy day. Does the screen offer a substitute, a restock date, a refund path, or does it just apologise and send them back to the category page? Most teams don’t actually know, because nobody’s had a reason to check. Same story for the delivery postcode a courier can’t reach, or the fraud check that holds a genuine order with no explanation. None of these are regulatory problems the way BNPL is, and nobody’s coming to check whether they’re well designed. That’s the risk: the pressure that fixed the BNPL screen doesn’t exist here, so the neglect continues until enough customers hit it on a big enough day.
Fixing the screen before something forces the issue
Nobody suddenly cared more about decline screens in July. A regulator made one of them somebody’s problem. You can do the same to the rest of yours yourself, for free, before anything forces the issue: pick your highest-traffic unhappy-path screen, find out who owns it, and if the honest answer is “nobody, really,” that’s the cheapest improvement you’ll find this quarter. It doesn’t need new features or budget. It needs someone to notice the screen’s been running on autopilot and decide it’s worth an hour of design thinking.
The happy-path map gets redrawn every time you launch something new. The other one hasn’t been touched since whoever set up the integration walked away from it. That’s the map worth opening first.
If you know your site has screens like this running on default, let’s talk.
We’ll help you find the screens nobody’s owning and fix them properly.