A subscription box losing buyers between cart and checkout

A subscription box losing buyers between cart and checkout

A US meal-kit service noticed a 9% drop-off the instant shoppers clicked Checkout. The cart page was edge-cached and snappy, but the checkout page was dynamic, uncached, and pulled from a Texas origin — so Seattle users hit a 700ms blank gap that read as a broken click.

The funnel had a fast page handing off to a slow one.

What we changed: added an edge prefetch hint on the cart page that warmed the checkout's static shell (layout, JS bundle, payment iframe) at the POP the moment the cart rendered. Only the live cart total stayed dynamic.

Perceived checkout load in Seattle dropped from 700ms to 110ms. The shell hit the edge cache 97% of the time. Cart-to-checkout drop-off fell from 9% to 3.4%, and that recovered roughly 5.6% of started checkouts.

The number that mattered: checkout drop-off 9% to 3.4%.