Rebuilding a $14B checkout around pricing honesty

Verizon had not redesigned online ordering in fifteen years. The site was a $14 billion consumer division revenue channel running on a stack that predated the iPhone. Cart abandonment was 73 percent. The business needed a number, not a redesign. The job was to find the number, build the case for the work that would change it, and ship the work without breaking the channel that was already running.

I started by mapping the entire customer journey across four sales channels (web, app, kiosk, call center) instead of just the surface I had been hired to fix. Three things showed up in the first month.

First, the checkout was twelve steps. Industry standard at the time was four to five. Every additional step was bleeding ten to fifteen percent of the funnel.

Second, pricing was hidden until the final screen. Promotional discounts, bundle rules, taxes, regional fees, none of it was visible until the customer had already entered their payment information. We were optimizing for conversion at the exact step where the customer learned what the product actually cost.

Third, and this was the hardest one, the team had been measuring the wrong number. Conversion at checkout was the surface metric. The actual problem was diagnostic: customers were arriving at checkout with the wrong cart configuration because the configurator above checkout had taught them to expect a price that checkout then revealed was not the real price. The bleed was not in checkout. It was in the lie checkout was being asked to deliver.

I made three opinionated calls.

Reduce checkout from twelve steps to four. Aggressive, against precedent, the kind of thing that gets pushed back on by every adjacent team that owns one of the steps. I argued the case publicly and committed.

Surface real pricing upfront. Show promotional discounts, bundle rules, and regional fees in the configurator, not in checkout. The instinct in telecom was to hide the full price as long as possible. I argued that the cart abandonment was the cost of that instinct.

Decouple the migration. The old checkout was running. Don't replace it. Run the new one in parallel, route a small percentage of traffic, escalate based on a hypothesis-driven testing protocol, not on raw conversion delta. We knew what we believed. We tested whether we were right, not whether we were lucky.

The redesigned checkout shipped to four sales channels: web, mobile web, native app, and assisted (call center reps using the same flow). The work covered the entire funnel from configurator to confirmation, not just the four checkout steps. It included a unified pricing model surfaced through a single component, a cart-aware configurator that prevented the mismatch problem at the source, and controlled migration tooling that let the team escalate from 5% traffic to 100% over six months without taking the channel down once.

Conversion lifted 72% through the new checkout. Attributed revenue across the consumer digital portfolio was $200M+ over the two-year measurement window, traceable to the redesign through the controlled migration data. Upfront pricing transparency, the call I had argued for hardest internally, was adopted as a telecom industry standard within eighteen months. Within five years, every major US carrier was showing real prices in the configurator. The instinct that had been protected for fifteen years did not survive the data.

The thing I would do differently is start the conversation with finance and operations earlier. I built the design case first and brought finance in second. The work shipped, but the first six months of stakeholder management would have been smoother if I had started with the people who owned the revenue model and worked outward from there. The lesson, which I have applied at every role since: in mature companies, design's job is to convince finance that the design instinct is also the financial instinct. That conversation goes faster when you start it on day one.