CHECKOUT COMPLEXITY AT THE FINAL FUNNEL STAGE AS A DRIVER OF CONVERSION AND REVENUE IN A DIGITAL TICKET MARKETPLACE

Abstract

The present article investigates the properties determining checkout complexity at the end of the funnel and impacting the conversion rate and revenue of a digital ticket marketplace․ The analysis is based on anonymized operational data from three companies of a ticketing holding during the period of January 2024 to June 2026‚ containing 195‚644 unique orders‚ as well as the complete acquiring dataset for the marketplace‚ containing 23‚928 payment operations․ Checkout complexity is operationalized through the share of incomplete payments, the frequency of technical declines, the number of payment attempts, payment duration and payment method. The study finds that the order-level conversion of the final payment stage equals 68.9%, while the lost revenue of never-paid orders after removing anomalous observations reaches 1,131.2 million rubles against 1,781.5 million rubles of confirmed revenue. The performance gap between 1-tap payment and manual card entry ranges from 19.6 to 29.4 percentage points. Retry attempts recover 43.3% of orders that faced a first-attempt decline and generate 15.5% of the paid turnover of the acquiring dataset. A conversion gain of 1 percentage point is valued at 36.4 million rubles of additional revenue over the observation period. The results allow treating payment friction reduction as a manageable financial reserve of a digital marketplace and define a set of priority managerial decisions.