+11% checkout conversion and €8–12M annual impact. Rebuilt the checkout experience by fixing what nobody was measuring.
Sole designer on the checkout funnel for one of the world's largest travel experience platforms. 150M+ travelers, 4 EU markets. I owned research, hypotheses, experiment design, and analysis end-to-end.
Complete funnel. I quantified the economic cost of every drop-off point. My scope: everything from add-to-cart through payment processing.
Checkout funnel, end-to-end.
GetYourGuide processes millions of bookings per year across multiple European markets. The checkout funnel, from add-to-cart through payment confirmation, was the highest-leverage surface in the product. Strong acquisition, weak conversion.
Scope: Checkout funnel (end-to-end)
Users: 150M+ travelers
Markets: 4 EU markets
Work: Research, hypotheses, experiment design, analysis
Everyone was optimizing the wrong step.
The team was focused on the payment form. The real problems were elsewhere. Three things were silently killing conversion:
- Pricing felt inconsistent and untrustworthy. Users were looping between checkout and product page, trying to validate the price. "All taxes included" wasn't enough. They wanted to see the math.
- Mobile transitions were breaking user flow. Each step was a separate page load. Users lost visual context of their order, the timer, and their progress. 65% of traffic was mobile.
- Payment defaults didn't match local behavior. Credit card showed first globally. In the Netherlands, 72% of online payments use iDEAL. In Poland, BLIK dominates. Users scrolled past an entire form they didn't want.
Experimentation roadmap and cart interaction map. Every experiment traces to a specific behavioral signal.
The biggest opportunity wasn't in the payment form. It was in everything leading up to it.
Users weren't dropping because of friction. They were dropping because of doubt.
Session recordings showed the same pattern: users reached checkout, hesitated, scrolled back to verify pricing, lost context on mobile reloads, and abandoned. The payment form was fine. The problem was that users arrived at it uncertain.
Three interventions. Each targeted a specific moment of doubt.
1. Made pricing transparent
Users were looping between checkout and product page trying to validate the price. I introduced clear price breakdowns, removed ambiguity beyond "all taxes included," and reduced cognitive load at the decision point. Per-person cost visible. Itemized breakdown showing exactly what they were paying for.
Cart confirmation with cross-sell, and shopping cart with countdown timer, price breakdown, and trust signals above CTA.
2. Fixed mobile flow continuity
Each step reload killed context. I reduced perceived step boundaries, preserved visual continuity (progress, timer, order summary), and smoothed transitions across steps. The largest architectural bet: collapsing the 3-screen mobile flow into one scrollable page. One page eliminated three loading events.
The 3-step checkout: Activity (pickup, options) → Contact (personal details, provider info) → Payment (method selection, 3DS verification).
3. Localized payment defaults
Global defaults were wrong. I adapted payment methods per market, prioritized familiar options (iDEAL in Netherlands, BLIK in Poland, Sofort in Germany), and reduced hesitation at the final step. Preferred method expanded by default; others collapsed.
What trade-offs did I make?
Every decision involved choosing between speed-to-ship and depth of change. These were the most consequential:
| Decision | Chosen | Rejected | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile architecture | Single-page checkout | Responsive tweaks to existing 3-step flow | 8–12% drop-off at every transition. Fixing transitions wasn't enough. The transitions themselves were the problem. |
| Price transparency | Full itemized breakdown | Better "taxes included" messaging | Users wanted to see the math, not be told it was fair. Messaging didn't stop the anxiety loop. |
| Payment localization | Geo-IP dynamic ordering | Manual market-specific pages | Scalable across markets. One system, not four maintained pages. |
| Urgency signals | Honest countdown (existing hold time) | Artificial scarcity ("only 2 left") | Real inventory data, not manufactured pressure. Zero urgency-related support tickets. |