The address form is where Indian carts go to die

Watch a session replay of a mobile checkout and you'll see the moment of death: the address form. Name, house number, street, landmark, city, state, pincode — thumbs on glass, autocorrect fighting Hindi-English street names, a delivery bike honking outside. Industry studies put Indian cart abandonment near 70%, and the address form is where most of it happens.

Why the form is worse here

• Indian addresses are long and unstructured — landmarks matter, formats vary by city, and half of them don't fit the fields designed for them.
• Shopping is mobile-first: every extra field costs more on a phone keyboard than it ever did on desktop.
• Guest checkout means starting from zero every time — the store that delivered to you last month has forgotten you completely.

Identity beats autofill

Browser autofill helps the organised few. The real unlock is remembering shoppers across stores: verify the phone with an OTP, and a shopper who has ever completed checkout anywhere on the network gets their saved addresses offered back — on a store they've never visited. First-time buyers who feel like regulars convert like regulars.

For the true first-timer, shrink the ask

• Phone first, one field, big keyboard-native input — commitment before effort.
• OTP on WhatsApp with a copy button, SMS fallback — verification without app-switching gymnastics.
• Pincode → city and state auto-filled; the shopper types the house and street, nothing more.
• Address quality checked quietly in the background — gibberish caught before it becomes an RTO, not after.

Trust furniture pays rent here too

Delivery ETA next to the address, a free-shipping progress bar, transparent COD fees, a visible total that never jumps at the last step. None of these are decoration — each answers a doubt that would otherwise be answered by leaving.

Conversion work is subtraction work. Count the taps between 'I want this' and 'paid', and delete.

This is the problem phone-first, 1-click checkout exists to remove: verify the phone once, autofill the address forever after, and the form that kills most carts becomes two taps.