Codecademy · B2C · learn-to-code courses
Rewrite checkout payment errors to tell buyers exactly how to fix them
About 1% more checkout conversion (guest's conservative guess) from 2 days of work
Workedpayments-checkout
What they did
Downloaded all checkout page payment errors, stack-ranked them by frequency, rewrote the copy so each failure tells the user what is wrong and what to do (instead of 'Invalid payment method. Please contact your bank.'), with fallbacks: if the card fails, offer PayPal; if PayPal fails, send them back to a card. Merged back into the codebase. Took about 2 days. Rationale: 100% of new revenue passes through checkout, so a 1% lift lifts all revenue 1%.
What happened
Guest calls it one of the highest-ROI projects at Codecademy; 'very conservatively' ~1% checkout conversion lift.
- Effort
- About 2 days of work
“one of the highest ROI projects we ever did at Codecademy is we rewrote all of the checkout page error copy.”
“If it doesn't work, send them PayPal. PayPal doesn't work, send them back to a card. It literally took like 2 days of downloading stuff, stack-ranking the errors, rewriting it, re-merging it back to the codebase.”
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