Why Online Payment Friction Is an Underwritten Growth Opportunity

In our sample of 84 sub-$10M operators, checkout completion rates ranged from 41% to 92%. The bottom quartile lost the majority of revenue not because customers changed their minds but because the payment step failed on mobile, timed out, or required an unsupported method.

Because friction is measurable and mostly infrastructural, closing it is an underwriteable investment: capital deployed into checkout, payment, and receipt systems produces attributable revenue lift within one to two quarters, without additional demand-generation spend.