Is your checkout killing your sales? 6 common mistakes and how to fix them
You've paid to get the customer this far. Here's where MENA checkouts most often lose them, and what to change.
Checkout is the most expensive place to lose a customer. By the time someone reaches it, you've paid for the click, earned their attention and convinced them to buy. Every drop-off at this stage is acquisition spend that produced nothing.
Shoppers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have specific expectations around payment, delivery and language. These are the six problems we find most often when we audit ecommerce checkouts in the region.
1. Too many steps
Every extra field and every extra page is a reason to leave. Remove anything you don't need to fulfil the order, enable guest checkout, and use address autofill where your platform supports it. Shorter is almost always better.
2. Forcing account creation
Asking customers to create an account before they can pay is one of the most reliable ways to lose them. Offer guest checkout, and invite them to create an account after the purchase, when the decision is already made.
3. The wrong payment options for the market
Payment preferences vary sharply by market. In Egypt, cash on delivery is still a major share of orders, and instalment providers such as valU matter for higher-ticket items. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Mada, Apple Pay and buy-now-pay-later options such as Tabby and Tamara are often expected. If a customer can't pay the way they want to, they won't pay at all.
4. No trust at the moment of hesitation
Checkout is where doubt peaks. Show what reassures people in your market: clear return and exchange terms, delivery timelines, recognisable payment logos, and reviews close to the order button. Hidden policies feel like a trap.
5. Surprise costs and vague delivery
Delivery fees that only appear on the last step are one of the biggest causes of abandonment. Show shipping costs and delivery time early, ideally on the product page. If you offer free shipping above a threshold, say so clearly and show how close the cart is to reaching it, which also lifts average order value.
6. Language and layout that don't fit the customer
If your customers think in Arabic, your checkout should work properly in Arabic, with right-to-left layout, correctly translated fields and address formats that match how people actually write addresses locally. A machine-translated checkout costs more trust than it saves in effort.
How to find your biggest leak
Don't guess. Look at your funnel data from cart to checkout to purchase, watch session recordings of real customers on mobile, and place a few test orders yourself on a phone over mobile data. The biggest problem is usually obvious within an hour. Fix that first, measure the change in net sales, then move to the next one.
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