You want to know why a rival's checkout converts and yours stalls. The way to find out is to go through their flow as a buyer would, screen by screen, and write down what happens at each step. Not a vague impression afterward. A record of the shipping form, the coupon field, the payment step, and the exact moment the flow asks you to create an account.
Here is a repeatable pass you can run in about twenty minutes, ending with one link your team reads without installing anything.
Set up before you touch their site
Open a fresh browser tab and go to start a new review. Nothing to install, no extension, no signup to get going. Keep that tab open in one window and the competitor's site in another so you can flip between capturing and browsing.
Decide what a real buyer does before you start clicking. Pick a product, add it to the cart, and go through checkout as if you intended to pay. Use a real email and stop before you enter card details. You want the flow's actual behavior, including whatever it makes you do to reach the payment screen.
Turn on your microphone if you are in Chrome or Edge. The comment box on each item lets you dictate with the browser's built-in speech recognition, which is faster than typing while you watch a screen. On Firefox, dictation is not available, so you type instead. If your team splits across browsers, the note on what to do when your reviewer is on Firefox covers it.
Capture each checkout screen as its own item
Walk the flow one screen at a time. On each meaningful step, switch to your review tab and click Capture screen. The browser asks which window to share, then draws the current frame to a canvas. Drag a rectangle to crop down to the part that matters, or keep the full frame. That crop is the only image edit, so frame it to show exactly what you are commenting on.
A checkout usually breaks into these steps, and each deserves its own captured screenshot:
- Cart page: does it show shipping cost and taxes here, or hide them until later?
- Contact and shipping form: how many fields, and does it force account creation before it will proceed?
- Shipping method: are options clear, and is a price attached to each?
- Payment step: which methods appear, and does the total finally match what the cart implied?
- Any interruption: coupon nag, upsell modal, address validation error, a spinner that hangs.
For each capture, dictate what you see and what a buyer would feel. "Shipping cost first appears on step three, jumps the total from 42 to 58 dollars, no warning earlier." That is the kind of note your team can act on. When a specific element is the problem, drop a numbered pin on it so nobody guesses which field you mean. The walkthrough on pinning the exact spot on a screenshot shows how tight that gets.
Add the comparison notes, not just the observations
A teardown is only useful if it points somewhere. After you capture each screen, add a free-floating comment item (no screenshot needed) that says what your own checkout does at the same step. "Ours asks for a phone number here and theirs does not." Those side-by-side lines are what turn screenshots into a decision.
Keep the notes concrete. Count fields. Note whether guest checkout exists. Record the exact copy on the button that submits the order. If the flow forces a signup, capture that screen and mark how far in it happens, because that is often where carts get abandoned. This is the heart of a proper competitive analysis: not "their checkout feels smoother" but a list of specific differences someone can weigh.
Publish and hand it to the team
Click Publish. The review saves and gets a short public URL like /r/your-slug. Anyone with that link reads the whole pass, screen by screen, with your dictated notes attached to each capture. No login, no tool to learn. Your PM opens it on their phone and gets the full picture.
The same review is available three other ways from one publish. Export a PDF or a Word document if you are dropping the teardown into a deck or a strategy doc. Grab the plain markdown at /r/your-slug/markdown if you want to paste the findings into a shared doc or a ticket. When your team is deciding what to change in your own flow, this is exactly the kind of UX feedback that gets fixed rather than filed and forgotten.
People with the link can comment on any individual item, so your designer can reply "we can drop the phone field this sprint" right on the screen where you flagged it. You mark each comment resolved as decisions get made. There is an analytics page too, showing who opened the review and roughly where they are, which tells you whether stakeholders actually looked.
If this pass turns up things worth fixing in your own product, the same capture-and-share method works on your live build. The competitive teardown workflow your team can use extends this into an ongoing habit, and a design review on the built product catches the gaps before they ship.
Run the pass now while the competitor's checkout is in front of you. Twenty minutes of captured screens beats an hour of remembering.