The opening claim
A merchant in Oran showed me her Instagram inbox. Eighty conversations from the past week. "Price?" "Available in black?" "Delivery to Sétif?" "Size M?" "Can I pay on arrival?"
One completed sale.
She thought she had a marketing problem. She had a friction problem. Every one of those eighty buyers wanted the product enough to send a message, and seventy nine of them disappeared somewhere between the question and the order.
The mechanism 🧠
Checkout friction is any question, choice or step that stands between a buyer who wants something and the moment the order exists.
Three ideas from psychology explain why it is so expensive.
Cognitive load theory. John Sweller showed that working memory is small. When a task asks us to hold and compare too many things at once, performance drops. A checkout with options for delivery, payment, account creation, coupon codes and gift wrapping is a working memory test the buyer did not sign up for.
Hick's law. The time it takes to make a decision grows with the number of options. Not linearly, but it grows. More choices mean a longer pause, and every pause is a moment where the phone buzzes, the bus arrives, or the buyer decides to "think about it".
Choice overload. In the famous jam study by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, a table with 24 jams attracted more people, but only about 3 percent of them bought. A table with 6 jams converted around 30 percent. Honesty matters here: later meta analyses found the effect varies a lot and sometimes disappears. Choice overload is strongest when options are hard to compare, the buyer is unsure what he wants, and the decision feels risky. That describes a first time buyer on an unknown Instagram shop almost perfectly.
You will also read about "decision fatigue" and ego depletion. The lab research behind ego depletion has had a rough time replicating, so I do not lean on it. The practical point does not need it: every decision is a chance to stop.
Every additional question you ask a customer before checkout is another place for the sale to die.
The Instagram DM graveyard
Selling through direct messages turns the whole purchase into a conversation, and conversations are slow.
- The buyer asks the price. The seller answers three hours later. The buyer has moved on.
- The buyer asks for sizes. The seller sends a photo of a chart. The buyer has to read it.
- The seller asks for name, phone, wilaya, commune, address, one message at a time.
- The buyer gives a phone number with a missing digit. The order ships and comes back.
Each step is small. Together they are a funnel with eight leaks, and the merchant is personally standing at every one of them with a mop. I wrote about the return side of this in building WovenDZ in public.
The one link checkout
When I built the checkout for WovenDZ, the design question was not "what can we add?". It was "what can we remove?".
- No account wall. A guest can add to cart and order without signing up. Forced account creation is one of the most common reasons shoppers give for abandoning a checkout.
- Five fields that matter. Name, phone, wilaya, commune, address. Nothing else is required to deliver a parcel in Algeria.
- One default payment. Cash on delivery is preselected and free. Card payment by Edahabia or CIB is shown as "coming soon" rather than offered half working.
- One review step. "Check your order before sending it." Then it is sent.
- The price is visible before the form. Delivery fees are shown at the store level, so there is no surprise at the last step.
The merchant shares one link. The buyer opens it, chooses, and orders. The conversation that used to take eight messages takes zero.
What the conversion data actually says
I will not promise you that cutting five steps to two doubles your sales. Nobody can promise a number like that without your data. Here is what the large, public research supports.
| Finding | Source |
|---|---|
| Roughly 70 percent of online carts are abandoned on average | Baymard Institute, aggregate of dozens of studies |
| A long or complicated checkout is cited by about one in five abandoners | Baymard checkout surveys |
| Being forced to create an account is a recurring top reason to abandon | Baymard checkout surveys |
| The average checkout has around 11 form fields, while 8 or fewer is usually enough | Baymard checkout benchmarks |
The direction is consistent across every serious study: fewer fields, fewer steps and fewer surprises convert better. The size of the effect is yours to measure.
How to measure it on your own store
- Count your steps. Write down every screen and every field between "I want this" and "order sent".
- Track drop off per step. Even a basic analytics setup can show how many people reach each stage.
- Remove one thing at a time and compare the next two weeks against the previous two.
- Measure confirmed orders, not clicks. In a cash on delivery market, an order that never ships is not a sale.
My guide to why landing pages fail to convert covers the steps before the checkout.
The Algerian reality
Friction here has a specific shape. Buyers often browse on entry level Android phones over variable 4G, so every extra screen also costs load time. Many are cautious about online sellers, so a long form reads as "what do they want my data for?". And because most orders are paid on delivery, the seller is carrying the risk of fake orders, which tempts him to add more questions.
The answer is not more questions. It is confirming the order after it is placed, by a call or a message, instead of interrogating the buyer before. Keep the form short, then verify.
What to actually do 🛠️
- Move from DMs to a link. One storefront link replaces the eight message conversation.
- Delete optional fields. If you do not need it to deliver the parcel, do not ask for it.
- Preselect the default. Cash on delivery first, card as an option when it actually works.
- Show the full price early, including delivery.
- Verify after the order, not before.
TL;DR 🧾
Buyers do not leave because they stopped wanting the product. They leave because the path got longer than their attention. Cognitive load, slower decisions and choice overload all push in the same direction. Replace DM conversations with a one link checkout, keep only the fields you need to deliver, preselect cash on delivery, and measure confirmed orders after each change.
Get a checkout built for how Algeria buys
If you sell through Instagram and want a store that turns messages into orders, start a store on WovenDZ, or talk to me about a custom build on the ecommerce service page. Agency projects go through Brandz Tech.