In 2023, as CoinDesk started selling tickets for Consensus 2024, about 70 percent of the people who added a ticket to their cart weren't finishing the purchase. Consensus is CoinDesk's flagship conference, so this was a fire alarm.
I was CoinDesk's director of product management at the time, and I came to the project partway through. It had started as an engineering-led effort, and it wasn't going well. The events lead was defining what success looked like and what the conference needed, but they were also trying to run all of Consensus, and they didn't have time to own a checkout redesign on top of that. So I took it over.
The Problem Was the Whole Journey
The obvious suspect was email verification. Buyers had to verify their email partway through, and an unverified account simply stopped moving through the system until they did. Verification was a real part of the problem, but it wasn't the whole problem.
When I mapped the journey from the moment someone decided to buy a ticket to the moment they were fully registered for Consensus, it ran more than 20 steps. Create an account, set a password, leave to verify your email, come back, answer registration questions, pay, and more, across several separate screens and systems. Every step was a place to lose someone, and we were losing most of them.
Three Weeks of Journey Mapping
I spent about three weeks on journey mapping, research, and alternatives. Most of that time went to deciding what we could cut. I mapped every registration scenario I could find: someone already logged in, someone with a CoinDesk account who wasn't logged in, someone brand new, and someone who wanted to check out as a guest. Then I traced each one across the login service, the CoinDesk account system, and the event platform, with a customer journey map for each that rated how the user would feel at every step.
Cutting was harder than it sounds, for two reasons.
Some of the registration questions I wanted to remove existed because CoinDesk had to report that data to vendors and partners. Those fields couldn't simply disappear, so the work was figuring out which ones were truly required, asking for those as efficiently as possible, and dropping the rest.
The bigger constraint was that the same system ran CoinDesk's webinars. Those were often sponsored, and CoinDesk had data obligations to those sponsors, too. Any change to how a Consensus buyer moved through registration was also a change to how a webinar attendee did. I had to be careful about how we made each change and how it appeared on screen, so that fixing Consensus didn't break anything outside it.
Two Paths Instead of One Long One
The redesign came down to two paths. An existing CoinDesk user who was already logged in got a happy path of about four steps. Everyone else got a path of about seven to nine. Either way, it was a fraction of what buyers had been facing.
Getting there took a lot of small decisions that added up:
- Verification moved to the end. Buyers could buy their ticket first and verify their email when they went to access it, so verification became part of getting the ticket instead of a wall in front of the purchase.
- Screens were combined. Account creation and event registration became one form, instead of a sign-up screen followed by a separate registration screen.
- We stopped asking for what we already knew. For someone already logged in, the email field was prefilled and the password field disappeared. For someone typing their email, the system checked it right away to tell whether they already had an account.
- Fewer questions. We cut every registration question we didn't need to collect.
- Logging in got easier, too. Reminder emails carried a magic link, so people didn't have to remember a password to get back in.
Moving verification later couldn't mean giving up what it protected. An unverified registration couldn't be attached to an existing CoinDesk account with the same email, and an unverified user couldn't log in to manage a CoinDesk account profile. The friction moved, but the safeguards stayed where they were.
Results: Back to a Normal Funnel
After the new flow shipped, conversion and drop-off went back to typical levels for a ticket purchase. The Consensus team was very happy with it, and we delivered it relatively quickly.
Because the webinars ran on the same system, the webinar team got the shorter flow at the same time, and their sign-up rate improved without any extra work. The APIs we built for the new flow also outlasted the project. We reused them, and the pattern behind them, on later work.
What I'd Tell a Team With a Leaky Funnel
When a funnel loses most of its users, it's tempting to hunt for the one broken step. Sometimes that step exists, but here the real problem was the length of the journey, and the only way to see it was to walk the whole thing, end to end, for every kind of user. The fix wasn't one change. It was dozens of small ones, each removing a step someone had a reason for.
The other lesson is about shared systems. The webinar constraint made the work harder, and it also meant the fix helped a second team for free. When a system serves more than one audience, every change has two sets of users to protect, and two sets that can benefit.
FAQ: Reducing Checkout Drop-Off
What causes high cart abandonment in event ticket checkout?
Usually a long journey with too many separate steps, rather than one bad screen. At CoinDesk, buying a Consensus ticket took more than 20 steps across account creation, email verification, registration questions, and payment. Each step was another chance to lose a buyer.
Should you verify email before or after a purchase?
When you can, after. At CoinDesk, buyers purchased their ticket first and verified their email to access it. That kept verification's protections in place while removing it as a barrier in front of the purchase.
How do you shorten a checkout flow that other teams depend on?
Map every scenario that runs through it, including the ones that aren't yours, and find out which data each team is actually obligated to collect. At CoinDesk, the ticketing system also ran sponsored webinars, so every change had to work for both, and both ended up benefiting.
Related Case Studies
- CoinDesk Replatform: Arc XP to Sanity + Vercel – another CoinDesk project where the planning before the build mattered most.
- CoinDesk: From 9-Month Delays to 3x Productivity – the delivery turnaround across CoinDesk's product and engineering teams, written up on fieldway.org.
- Designing a Soft Gate for Email Verification at Tallo – the same lesson about when to ask for verification, applied to a platform for teens and young adults.