Marketers love to talk about LTV. How to increase it. How to segment it. How to squeeze more value out of each user over time.
And they’re not wrong – except for one thing: By the time you’re trying to optimize lifetime value through campaigns and retention flows, the real opportunity may already be gone.
Because LTV doesn’t start with content. Or onboarding. Or engagement. It starts at checkout.
The moment of transaction is where value is made – or lost
That first successful payment isn’t just a conversion – it’s the first signal of trust, intent, and (crucially) revenue. And yet, it’s the part of the user journey that’s often treated as an afterthought. Businesses obsess over acquisition strategy and product flow, but hand off payments to a third-party provider with the hope that it “just works.”
But when checkout fails – due to poor UX, unsupported payment methods, declined cards, friction from regulatory requirements – users often don’t come back. The journey ends before it even begins.
Worse, the LTV model doesn’t account for these missing users. They don’t show up as churn. They just… disappear. And so the business keeps optimizing for the wrong audience: the ones who made it through the system, not the ones who should have.
Good payments don’t just improve conversion. They multiply retention.
Here’s the part that’s too often missed: a seamless, flexible checkout experience doesn’t just reduce drop-off – it sets the tone for every interaction that follows.
When a user pays easily, in their preferred method, in their preferred currency, at the moment they’re most ready to act, they’re far more likely to complete a future transaction. They’re more likely to trust your platform. More likely to recommend it. More likely to use stored details next time. This is where LTV starts to compound.
And yet, payments infrastructure is still viewed by many as back-office plumbing – the necessary evil that enables the “real” product. Until it breaks. Or underperforms. Or quietly leaves revenue on the table.
Complexity at checkout doesn’t scale with your ambitions
Fast-growing companies often expand quickly into new regions, new customer segments, new monetization models. But if your payment infrastructure can’t keep up with these changes, neither can your LTV.
Unsupported currencies, missing payment methods, or regional compliance friction create not just lost sales – they create lost users. If your checkout process is optimized for where you started, not where you’re going, then your LTV numbers will reflect the limits of your infrastructure, not the potential of your business.
It’s time to move LTV closer to the stack
Thinking about LTV as just a marketing or retention metric is outdated. In reality, it’s a product + payments metric. And it’s influenced heavily by what happens before a user ever sees their first success message.
Can they pay how they want?
Do their cards work in your system?
Can you support their country, their currency, their compliance flow?
If the answer is no – or even “it depends” – then you’re not losing LTV in the funnel. You’re losing it at the start line.
