Customer Friction: How To Spot and Reduce Customer Friction

There are all sorts of friction points that prevent a person from engaging with a brand or making a purchase. From glitchy websites to frustrating checkout processes, small obstacles can discourage potential customers and push them toward other brands. 

As a business owner and operator, it’s your job to identify any friction points and remove them to create a welcoming, user-friendly retail experience that makes people want to buy from you. Removing friction is a process you can tackle methodically. Here’s how to spot it, understand why it matters, and fix it before it costs you sales.

What is customer friction?

Customer friction refers to anything in a process, product, service, or interaction that makes it harder for customers or potential customers to do business with your company. It is the gap between a customer’s experience and their desired outcome. 

For example, if you only accept a store-issued Visa card and your shopper has American Express, you have a friction point in the purchase process that may deter the customer from buying your product or service.

Minimizing friction helps you survive in a competitive ecommerce landscape. Your ability to reduce customer friction points can be the difference between a completed sale and a customer spending their money with competitors. With experience, you can identify customer friction points and find ways to address them before they hurt your conversion rates.

Friction points vs. pain points

Some people use the term “customer friction points” interchangeably with “customer pain points.” Both refer to problems in the sales funnel or customer experience that cause shoppers to disengage and perhaps shift their business to competitors. That said, the term “pain point” more specifically describes a customer issue that you can improve with your product or service. 

For example, a customer who hates going to their local coffee shop has a pain point that a coffee bean delivery service could address. But if the coffee bean delivery service has a confusing website that makes it difficult to start a subscription, that’s a friction point for this business as it tries to address a pain point for customers.

Examples of customer friction

Friction can pop up anywhere in the customer journey, hurting your ability to meet customer expectations. Some friction happens before a person ever reaches checkout, while other issues surface during or after a purchase.

• Complicated purchase processes. When the purchase process has too many steps or unclear breadcrumbs (a visual trail that shows customers where they are within a website), users drop off before completing a purchase. This leads to fewer conversions and lost revenue.

• Limited or inconvenient payment options. Modern consumers expect flexibility and convenience when paying for their purchases. One survey found that 70% of shoppers say a store’s policy on payment methods influences where they buy online. If you limit payment options, you introduce a friction point in the conversion process.

• Unexpected charges. Unexpected charges like service fees or high shipping rates could pose major speed bumps to customers who were ready to complete a purchase.

• Confusing onboarding process. A slow or unclear onboarding process prevents customers from quickly seeing all the value you offer, causing early drop-offs in the conversion funnel. 

• Poor customer support. A brand can lose money because of inadequate customer service, even if the product or service itself is strong. This comes into play when customer service reps can’t quickly answer customers’ questions, or when support is hard to reach.

Other friction points emerge from mismatched expectations or gaps in your digital experience:

• Misaligned marketing and product experience. If your marketing promises don’t meet customer expectations, consumers feel misled, harming trust in the brand and pushing them toward competitors.

• Lack of mobile optimization. With more consumers shopping on mobile devices, an inadequate mobile website can be a major source of friction. Businesses committed to creating frictionless experiences benefit from offering a mobile-optimized site, a mobile app, or both.

• Lack of information. When potential customers cannot find answers to simple questions—such as shipping costs or return policies—they can drift to other businesses. You can address friction of this sort by offering a clear FAQ section on your website.

• Fulfillment errors. Delays, mistakes, or poor communication during fulfillment add friction after the sale. Customers may have to take extra steps (e.g., phone calls, emails, returns) to get the products they ordered, creating a negative post-purchase experience.

The importance of reducing customer friction

You can offer terrific products and services, with great prices to boot, but these attributes might amount to little if you can’t deliver good customer service, a user-friendly website, and convenient payment options.

For examples of frictionless operations, look at companies that are thriving in ecommerce. Brooklinen enjoys a 3.5% to 4% conversion rate, higher than the 2.5% to 3% average for most businesses in the ecommerce world. A quick visit to Brooklinen’s website shows user-friendly, mobile-optimized themes, a robust FAQ section brimming with relevant information, and a generous 365-day return policy that may encourage a consumer to purchase. 

Case study: Odd Bunch

Odd Bunch founder Dijay Ojha encountered customer friction in the early days of his business, which sells oddly shaped but perfectly edible produce directly to households at a major discount. What Dijay found was that the friction points were coming from something he’d thought was a positive feature: individual pricing for each item.

“We were losing subscribers week on week,” Dijay recalls on the Shopify Masters podcast. “Our frequency had gone down. Our impressions had gone down. Consumers were communicating that they were not very happy with the product. They weren’t happy that everything was individually priced and they had to go in and choose exactly what they wanted.” The irony was that Dijay had envisioned individually priced items as a feature, not a bug. 

So how did his team respond to customer friction? “We whipped up a different website and rebranded,” Dijay says. “The idea was that you’d get a bunch of odd-looking fruits and vegetables in a box sent to you every week. It was as simple as that, for a fixed price you knew wouldn’t change.” Odd Bunch has since grown from serving 87 households to serving more than 100,000—due in part to Dijay’s willingness to change his approach in response to friction.

Signs of customer friction

How do you know if customer friction is holding back your business? Here are some tell-tale signs:

• Abandoned shopping carts. If lots of shoppers are adding items to their carts but failing to complete the purchase process, there is likely friction in your checkout process. High shipping costs, site security issues, or inconvenient payment options could be the culprit.

• Declining conversion rates. If visits remain stable but conversions fall, there may be something about the customer experience that’s creating obstacles rather than inspiring shoppers to engage.

• Increased customer support tickets. A rise in similar questions or complaints indicates an ecommerce store with confusing workflows, missing information, or insufficient self-service options.

• Low engagement after sign-up. When customers sign up for a service but don’t activate it or use the product, they’re likely encountering friction in your onboarding process. The process itself could be too tedious, or the product may have an intimidating learning curve.

• Negative feedback or sentiment. If your reviews contain complaints about difficulty, frustration, or inconvenience, it’s fair to assume that customers are reacting to friction points that hurt their overall satisfaction.

• Lower customer retention. When customers disengage shortly after purchasing—or stop using a product altogether—it may mean that friction points are thwarting their appreciation of your product or service. Customer retention strategies can help address these underlying issues.

How to reduce customer friction

• Simplify checkout
• Identify friction points through data analysis
• Improve first-use experiences
• Make information easy to find
• Strengthen customer support
• Use technology to automate and personalize
• Invest in user testing

These strategies can help you minimize customer friction, whether you’re fixing known problems or building a smoother experience from the start.

Simplify checkout

Make the purchase process fast and convenient by removing unnecessary steps and streamlining form fields on checkout pages.

Start by auditing each step and removing anything that isn’t essential to completing a purchase. This could include enabling guest checkout, minimizing the number of required form fields, or auto-filling shipping information when possible. You can also reduce friction by offering multiple trusted payment options, clearly displaying shipping costs and delivery timelines upfront, and optimizing the checkout flow for mobile devices.

Identify friction points through data analysis

Tools like Shopify Analytics can help you spot where customers abandon pages, stall during checkout, or drop out of the funnel, making it easier to pinpoint and prioritize friction points. When combined with Shopify Sidekick, your sales team can generate insights from customer data and plot next steps based on objective, actionable data.

Segment this data by device type, traffic source, or customer cohort to uncover patterns that point to specific issues.

Improve first-use experiences

Reducing friction early prevents confusion and churn, especially for new users encountering your product or service for the first time. Provide guidance tips to new clients and offer a status indicator for their onboarding process. For example, if they have to register their product before using it, show a graphic that indicates how much more they have to do to complete the process. Even a simple progress bar showing "Step 2 of 4" gives users a reason to keep going rather than abandoning a setup that feels open-ended.

Make information easy to find

Populate your website with clear pricing, policies, and product details. A robust FAQ section makes it easy to find this information. If customers can’t find the information they need, they will likely leave your site; if the information is readily available, you’ve removed a key obstacle to conversions and engagement.

Organize key details in predictable places and use clear navigation labels that match the language customers use. For example, link to pricing, shipping, and return policies directly from product pages, and surface FAQs near decision points like checkout. On-page search, expandable sections, or help widgets can also guide users to answers quickly, reducing frustration and keeping them moving toward conversion.

Strengthen customer support 

Providing excellent customer service—with fast responses, clear answers, and empowered support teams—reduces shopper frustration. Aligning your support team with your sales team also ensures a smoother transition from pre-sale questions to post-purchase help. Integrating support tools with your customer relationship management (CRM) system allows agents to see purchase history and past interactions, while collaboration with sales ensures pre-purchase questions are documented and carried through after checkout. 

Use technology to automate and personalize

Consider using AI tools to provide chat features, self-service portals, and personalized recommendations. These tools take strain off your team while helping customers get service and information on demand—without waiting for human assistance.

Invest in user testing

Regular user testing reveals real-world friction points that internal teams might miss. Apps that monitor user behavior can show you how customers navigate your site or app. This helps your team uncover usability issues before they hurt conversions.

Investing in user testing helps you see a product through the customer’s eyes. By observing how real users navigate flows, you can identify moments of confusion that analytics alone may not explain. This insight lets you make targeted improvements with confidence, reducing friction early and protecting conversion rates before small usability issues become larger barriers to growth.