Customer Pain PointsThe Top 12 Roadblocks in the Customer Journey & How to Remove Them

The Top 12 Customer Pain Points & What They Are Costing Beyond Just Sales

Think about the last time you tried to buy something online, but gave up halfway through.

Maybe the shipping costs blindsided you at checkout. Maybe the site was so slow that it wore down your patience. Or, maybe you couldn’t find basic info about the product you were looking at, and decided it wasn't worth the risk.

That frustration you felt? That’s the feeling of running up against a customer pain point. Collectively, they’re costing merchants billions in lost revenue every year.

We’ve discussed the concept of dynamic friction in the customer experience a few times on our blog. But even if you understand the concept, it can still be a somewhat vague and abstract idea. In this post, I’ll examine key customer pain points and see how they impact your buyers (and your bottom line).

What is a Customer Pain Point?

Customer Pain Point

[noun]/pān • point/

A customer pain point is a specific problem endured by potential customers. It’s a part of the customer experience that serves no helpful purpose and only serves to create negative friction and drive away buyers.

Let’s start from the beginning.

If friction is resistance in the customer experience, then pain points are the individual factors that cause that resistance.

A simpler way to explain this is to think of transaction friction — specifically the negative kind — as the cumulative impact of all the pain points your customer experiences. When you try to make a sale, you’re essentially trying to convince a potential customer that your product is worth buying.

Every pain point you allow in that process is an argument against you. They’re roadblocks that serve no purpose except to frustrate customers and send them straight to your competitors.

How Customer Pain Points Impact Your Business

Customer pain points hit your business on three levels. First, there's the immediate damage; the cart abandonment and lost sales. With 70% of shopping carts abandoned before checkout, every pain point in your customer experience is an argument against buying from you.

Second, there's the medium-term cost. We’re talking returns, customer service expenses, and negative reviews that damage your reputation. Third, and most expensive, there's the long-term revenue destruction. Chargebacks, eroded customer lifetime value, and the compounding effect of one disappointed customer telling people about their bad experience.

That last one is what really makes pain points particularly dangerous for merchants: they don't just lose sales, they trigger disputes. When a customer has a frustrating experience, they're far more likely to file a chargeback than contact your support team.

Product doesn't match the description? That becomes a “not as described” dispute. Delivery issues? That’s an “Item not received” chargeback. Poor communication about charges? It’s an “Unauthorized transaction.”

Fraud prevention measures that require additional verification are helpful friction points that protect both you and your customers. But, forcing shoppers to create an account before checkout, or hiding shipping costs until the final step? That's harmful friction that drives people away and destroys trust.

Understanding the 4 Core Categories of Customer Friction

Customer pain points fall into four distinct categories, and understanding this framework helps you diagnose problems in your own business. Most merchants deal with pain points across all four categories simultaneously, which is why a systematic approach to identification and resolution matters so much.

The Dirty Dozen: 12 Customer Pain Points Driving Cart Abandonment, Returns, & Chargebacks

Based on 2025 and 2026 merchant data, these twelve pain points cause the most revenue loss across eCommerce businesses.

5 Data-Driven Methods to Discover Which Pain Points Are Costing You Money

Identifying which specific issues are most likely to hurt your business is going to require some data, along with a careful review of the numbers. These five methods can help pinpoint exactly where you’re losing customers and revenue.

Mapping Your Customer Journey

Each customer complaint presents an opportunity to improve. Listen to your customers and place yourself in their shoes. By doing this, you can become much more effective at identifying and resolving the customer pain points that deter buyers and cause other problems.

The lifecycle of a customer interaction begins before your customer ever lands on your site, and it continues long after the checkout process. This is what’s called the customer journey.

The customer journey is the range of experiences had by shoppers when interacting with your brand. The customer journey begins at the first point of awareness and continues until after order fulfillment.

The first step toward resolving pain points in your customer experience is developing a map of the customer journey. This will provide a visual outline, making it easier to identify friction points, bottlenecks, and other problem factors.

It’s helpful to put yourself in your customer’s shoes when mapping this process. To do that, ask yourself:

• Who is your buyer?
• What problems do you know your buyer is experiencing?
• How does your buyer hope to solve their problems?
• Why did your buyer come to you, specifically?
• How does your buyer come to your site?

Below is an example of a rudimentary customer journey map. You can customize it to better reflect your process:

Using Social Listening to Identify Customer Pain Points

15% of all chargebacks in the last year were filed because the products or services didn’t match the merchant’s original description. Clearly, we have a disconnect between what customers expect and what merchants provide. Furthermore, one-third of Americans say they’re likely to post about a poor experience on social media.

While that’s definitely a bad thing, it does present an opportunity to grow if leveraged properly. That’s where social listening comes in.

At present, merchants typically think of social listening as a method for reaching customers and identifying trends. However, social listening is also a great way to identify customer pain points. Listening to buyers on social media gives you an unfiltered impression of what customers expect. This should supplement the insights you gain by mapping the customer journey.

Of course, we’re not suggesting that you weigh every piece of customer feedback equally. Many cases will be outliers or one-off mistakes. If you notice recurring themes in your customers’ complaints, however, you’ll know you have an unresolved customer pain point. Thus, careful data analysis to gain insights and act on opportunities is an equally important part of the process.

There are several approaches you can take to this. You can engage in basic social listening by simply searching your business name or other keywords on Twitter. You can also track customer reviews of your business; reviews offer a targeted glimpse into the customer experience. If recurring issues are present in multiple reviews, that's a direct sign that something needs attention.

There are tools available to help with more in-depth social listening, though, like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and HubSpot. All these services offer tools to help engage with customers on social media.

Which Pain Points to Fix First: The High-Impact, Low-Effort Framework

Not all pain points deserve equal attention. Creating a prioritization matrix helps you make strategic decisions about where to invest first.

Plot pain points on two dimensions: business impact and implementation effort. This creates four quadrants. You have high impact and low effort, high impact and high effort, low impact and low effort, and low impact and high effort.

High impact, low effort items (i.e. the “quick wins”) are your starting point. Things like site speed optimization, guest checkout, and simplified returns. These can typically be implemented in one to four weeks with modest budgets and deliver meaningful improvements right away.

The high impact, high effort (the “major project”) items require planning. These could be product information enhancement, omnichannel integration, and personalization engines. Expect two to six month timelines and substantial budgets, but also significant improvements when properly implemented.

Low impact, low effort changes (the “fill-in” fixes) should be worked on when time allows. Stuff like adding PayPal, improving search filters, implementing chat widgets. These take one to two weeks, require minimal investment, and deliver incremental improvements.

Your industry, business size, chargeback rate, and available resources should guide prioritization. Fashion retailers, for example, need exceptional product information; subscription businesses must prioritize returns. High chargeback rates mean prioritizing dispute-triggering pain points first. In the end, it needs to be tailored to your business.

Budget-Friendly Fixes: What You Can Do Today, This Month & This Quarter

So, you get the idea behind the matrix I laid out above. But, you just want me to tell you straight up: “What should I do?!”

I gotcha. Here’s a practical roadmap organized by budget and timeline, which should help make things clearer:

Things You Can Do This Week & Cost Less Than $100

• Add “Free Shipping Over $X” banners to the site
• Show estimated totals on product pages
• Enable guest checkout
• Remove unnecessary form fields
• Install free live chat (Tidio, Tawk.to)
• Create comprehensive FAQs
• Add a chatbot for common questions.

Things You Can Do This Month & Cost Less Than $5,000

• Tackle site speed through image compression
• Browser caching
• CSS/JavaScript minification
• Implement “lazy loading” strategy
• Create prepaid return labels and clear 30-day return policies
• Add PayPal ($0 setup, 2.9% + $0.30/transaction), Apple Pay, and Google Pay
• Add BNPL options like Afterpay or Klarna

Things You Can Do This Quarter & Cost Less Than $50,000

• Invest in professional product photography
• Add size charts, video demos, and reviews
• Implement inventory management with POS integration and real-time stock updates
• Add personalization through recommendation engines and email tools

How to Know If Your Pain Point Fixes Are Actually Working

Each pain point category — financial, process, productivity, and support — requires specific KPIs to track improvement.

Monitor cart abandonment rate, checkout completion rate, average order value, and conversion rate by source. These metrics directly indicate whether pricing transparency and payment flexibility are resonating with customers.

Track checkout funnel drop-off at each step, time to complete checkout, return request rate, and search success rate. These reveal whether your process improvements are genuinely reducing friction.

Watch page load speed, bounce rate, mobile conversion rate, and “item not as described” dispute rates. These metrics show whether customers can find what they need and make confident purchase decisions.

Measure first response time, customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Score, and ticket volume trends. These indicate whether customers can get help when they need it.

Track overall chargeback rate, rate by reason code, representment win rate, dispute-to-sale ratio, and friendly fraud rate. This is where your pain point improvements translate directly into dispute reduction and revenue protection.

Establish baselines before implementing fixes, track weekly for the first month, review monthly for three to six months, and shift to quarterly analysis ongoing. Combine Google Analytics, your eCommerce platform’s analytics, and chargeback analytics from Chargebacks911® for a complete picture.