E-commerce: Stripe rollout cut checkout abandonment by 40%

The challenge

Customers were dropping off on the redirect to the gateway-hosted page, and the team had no reliable way to know when a charge had really succeeded. The webhook listener was a single PHP file that crashed on duplicate events.

The approach

We replaced the redirect with Stripe Elements inside the existing checkout, moved the success / failed handling onto webhook events with idempotency keys, and added a queue worker so a slow database could not lose an event. We added Apple Pay and Google Pay during the same sprint.

The result

Checkout abandonment dropped from 31% to 18% within four weeks. Failed-charge support tickets fell to roughly one a week, down from a dozen.