Within three years of launching in 2020, Stellar Eats was stocked in major North American retailers, but their online store couldn’t match the pace. Those used to buying groceries with a tap kept adding things to their carts and leaving before paying.
So the Canadian brand switched to Shopify’s one-page checkout, and that change alone lifted conversions 3.5%—enough to project tens of thousands in added revenue over the next two years.
Stellar Eats had already done the hard part. The shoppers were there, and the products were in the cart, but the checkout was costing sales anyway. Baymard Institute puts average cart abandonment at 70.22%, which means 7 out of 10 loaded carts never convert. A good share of that is fixable, and this guide covers how.
What is checkout optimization?
Checkout optimization involves fine-tuning the online payment steps of an ecommerce website to reduce friction and decrease the number of people abandoning their shopping carts before completing a purchase.
You optimize the ecommerce checkout by making the final steps of a purchase easier. This means asking for less information, offering popular payment options like Apple Pay or PayPal, making the pages load faster, and designing the layout so it works on both mobile devices and desktops.
How does ecommerce checkout optimization impact conversion rates?
Even the best checkout flow can’t convert every cart; Baymard found 43% of US shoppers abandon the checkout process because they’re just browsing or not ready to buy yet.
In the same study, shoppers abandoned their carts because:
- 19% didn’t trust the site with their card details.
- 19% were forced to create an account.
- 18% found the checkout too long or complicated.
- 15% said the website had errors or crashed.
- 14% couldn’t see the total cost up front.
- 10% didn’t have enough payment methods.
Across more than 10 years of checkout testing, Baymard found the average large ecommerce site can raise conversions 35.26% through better checkout design alone. That’s $260 billion in recoverable orders across the $738 billion US and EU market.
Take Everlane, whose checkout suffered from two of the problems on Baymard’s cart abandonment list.
The apparel brand ran a complex, self-built checkout that tied up its engineers and made shoppers enter card and address details by hand. But rather than replatform, they added Shop Pay as a one-tap, pre-filled option in late 2023.
Everlane’s US transactions increased by 15% within 30 days, and the biggest conversion boost came from new and previously unconverted shoppers. By Shopify’s own estimation, Shop Pay boosted checkout conversion for Everlane by 70% at its peak.
“With the Shop Pay experience, people are getting through checkout faster than with all of our other payment methods,” says Anna M. Peterson, product lead at Everlane.
1. Make checkout faster to complete
At checkout, people are closer to buying than anywhere else on your site. Here, speed is about removing the reasons a committed buyer could change their mind.
Offer guest checkout and account creation post-purchase
Baymard Institute’s 2025 checkout benchmark benchmark study found 62% of sites fail to make “Guest Checkout” the most prominent option, so shoppers who don’t want an account fall off.
Presenting a clearly labeled button using terms like “Guest,” “Guest Checkout,” or “Continue as Guest” can reduce friction for the 19% of shoppers who abandon checkout rather than create an account.
Shopify’s customer accounts are built around guest checkout. Sign-in is passwordless, and the customer account is created automatically from the shopper’s email after purchase. The account forms around the completed order instead of blocking it. When shoppers return, their saved details autofill at checkout.
Show all costs upfront
Unexpected costs are one of the most common reasons shoppers abandon checkout. Baymard found that 14% of shoppers leave when they can’t see the total cost upfront.
Some retailers still wait until the final step to reveal shipping charges, taxes, or handling fees—a practice known as “drip pricing.” Beyond eroding trust, surprise fees are now drawing legal scrutiny.
In March 2026, Abercrombie & Fitch was hit with a class-action lawsuit, Heilman v. Abercrombie & Fitch Co., alleging they concealed a mandatory $7 handling fee on their Abercrombie and Hollister sites until the final step of checkout, in violation of California consumer protection law.
Shopify’s checkout handles this natively. The cart itemizes subtotal, shipping, and tax before anyone pays, and stores can set free-shipping thresholds flagged with a banner. Tax-inclusive pricing is supported in markets that expect it.
For example, here’s a Shopify order summary on Rare Beauty’s checkout page:
If you’re operating in cross-border ecommerce networks, duties and import taxes get automatically calculated at checkout.
Simplify form fields and enable address autofill
The average US checkout puts 23.48 fields and elements in front of shoppers by default, and Baymard finds most can shed 20% to 60% of them without losing anything they need.
Start with the easy cuts. Baymard’s input-field research shows shoppers tense up once 10 to 15 fields pile onto one screen.
Merge “First name” and “Last name” into a single “Full name,” and hide optional fields behind a link to enable a faster checkout process.
If someone gave their ZIP code or email address earlier in the buying process, carry it forward. Prefill any information you already have, but in open, editable fields so mistakes are easy to spot and correct.
Shopify’s address autocomplete runs by default on every store; a shopper types a few characters, picks their address, and the rest of the fields fill themselves.
The same goes for returning customers: a signed-in account or Shop Pay fills the whole block from saved details, which is how Everlane cut down on manual card entry after adding Shop Pay.
2. Build trust at checkout
A shopper paying for the first time has no reason to assume your checkout is safe; they’re entering card details on a page they’ve never used before, run by a company they may not know well.
Here, reassure them with a returns policy they can find, recognized payment options, and other trust signals to reduce uncertainty at checkout.
Show shoppers the checkout is safe
The 19% of shoppers who abandon their cart because they don’t trust a site are going with their gut. Across testing dating back to 2009 and re-confirmed in its latest round, Baymard has consistently found shoppers rate a checkout’s safety by “how safe it looks.”
On an HTTPS page, every field is encrypted identically, yet the ones wrapped in a border, a background tint, or a lock icon “feel” safer than the bare fields beside them.
A recognized trust badge adds to the effect, under two conditions, according to Baymard: The badge has to be one that shoppers know and recognize, and it earns more at a smaller store than at a household name.
Shop Pay does double duty here. Your shoppers likely recognize its branding from the other stores where they’ve used it. That familiarity is its own reassurance—the recognized-mark effect Baymard describes. Further, its mere presence at checkout can lift lower-funnel conversion by up to 5% before a shopper even taps it.
“The familiarity and trust our customers have with Shop Pay added another layer of comfort, enhancing the overall speed and frictionless experience of the checkout process,” says Claire Miller, ecommerce manager at Princess Polly.
Include return or refund policy links in the footer
Baymard’s 2025 data shows 15% abandon checkout over an unsatisfactory return policy. Before placing an order, shoppers want straightforward answers to basic questions like:
Can I return this?
Who pays for return shipping?
How long do I have?
When the answers are buried, shoppers leave. Baymard also finds that 43% of ecommerce sites don’t show return information on the product page at all.
Make the answers easy to reach at the moment of doubt. Baymard’s testing found that a subgroup of shoppers, more often on desktop, instinctively scan the footer for shipping and return information.
So a checkout that links its refund policy there, as Gymshark’s does, meets them exactly where they look:
Show shoppers how close they are to free shipping
Free shipping is one of the strongest nudges available. In DHL’s 2026 Ecommerce Trends Report, it ranks as the “No. 1 reason” that gets customers to complete a purchase.
A threshold turns that into action. Tell a shopper they’re a few dollars away from free shipping, and many will add an item to clear it.
On Shopify, you can set the threshold as a free shipping discount above a minimum cart value, then surface it where shoppers will act on it.
Then, use Shopify Flow to tag your VIPs or repeat buyers automatically—say, after their third order—and show them a lower free-shipping threshold than first time customers.
3. Expand payment options to match customer expectations
A checkout that doesn’t carry a shopper’s usual payment method becomes more difficult at the point of purchase. And the default varies by market, so a payment lineup that looks complete in one country can come up short in another.
Match currency and payment methods to each market
The way a customer prefers to pay depends entirely on where they’re located. Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report shows that digital wallets account for 77% of ecommerce value in Asia-Pacific (APAC). In the United States, cards remain the leading payment method, while digital wallets account for 40% of ecommerce transaction value. Individual markets also lean on methods that barely register elsewhere.
A checkout built only for US-style card payments asks much of the world to pay in a way they don’t.
On Shopify, Markets allow you to group the countries you sell to and assign local currencies, pricing, and languages per region. Shopify Payments then processes each order in the shopper’s own currency.
On Shopify’s Advanced and Plus plans, Markets can also calculate and collect duties and import taxes at checkout, so an international shopper sees the full landed cost.
The Swedish jewelry brand Syster P sells in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Germany, and had been running a separate site per market. After consolidating their multiple storefronts into a single Markets-based store, their international sales doubled year over year.
“Being able to easily add local payment methods is a big fix. … We just switch it on, and everything works,” says Hanna Holmberg, head of marketing.
Give the option to buy now, pay later (BNPL)
The US buy now, pay later (BNPL) market is forecast to grow by 14.9%, to reach $123.41 billion in 2026, and shoppers increasingly arrive at checkout expecting the option to split payments rather than pay the full amount upfront.
When the option isn’t there, shoppers click away. DHL’s 2026 report found 62% of shoppers will abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method isn’t offered.
On Shopify, Shop Pay Installments is available to eligible stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. For US orders, it covers carts from $35 to $30,000, and it shows the per-installment price on the product page.
Shopify’s own data reports that one in four retailers sees a 50% lift in average order value after adopting Shop Pay Installments. Pillow Cube, for example, which previously used another provider, drove 10 times the installment revenue after switching—175% more in the first month alone.
“Shop Pay Installments has definitely been good for us! It’s now 6.5% of our gross merchandise volume [GMV],” says Will Beck, director of business development at Pillow Cube.
Offer digital wallets and one-click payment methods
In Worldpay’s data, digital wallets—including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Cash App, and other wallet providers—accounted for 56% of global ecommerce spending in 2025, the single largest share of any method.
Credit cards came second at 20%, and that gap is set to widen; wallet use is forecast to grow 10.2% a year through 2030 while credit cards decline to 18% of ecommerce spending.
Further, Baymard’s payment UX research finds that 21% of sites have payment option problems serious enough to cost them orders, because some shoppers won’t proceed without their preferred method.
The fix is to present wallets as distinct, clearly labeled buttons above the card form—the way Heatonist puts Shop Pay, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay under an “Express checkout” header at the top of the page:
4. Optimize for mobile checkout
A lot of your traffic today is likely coming from a mobile device. Across Dynamic Yield’s benchmark network, mobile drove roughly 76% of ecommerce visitors over the past year, and 74% in April 2026 alone.
Yet phones convert below desktop. In April 2026, the mobile cart abandonment rate was 81.72%.
Use mobile-first design principles to design the checkout page
Baymard, which has run more than 20,000 hours of mobile-only checkout testing, found that mobile sites often convert significantly worse than their desktop counterparts. Mobile shoppers frequently encounter usability issues tied to small screens, such as typing a 16-digit card number on a phone, landing on the wrong keyboard, or mis-tapping a cramped field.
Shopify Checkout is built as a fully responsive, mobile-first experience, and it includes address autocomplete, so a shopper taps a suggestion instead of typing out a full address on a phone keyboard. That covers the checkout step itself.
The rest is the path to it, which runs on your theme. That’s where the mobile-first principles are your job. Make tap targets big enough to hit with a thumb; Apple and Google both advise a range of 44 pixels to 48 pixels. And space them so a stray tap doesn’t land on the wrong control.
Use Baymard’s touch-keyboard cheat sheet as your reference. They advise a numeric keypad for number entry, the email layout with the @ key for email, and autocorrect off for names and addresses.
For example, on Kylie Cosmetics’ mobile checkout, tapping into the card-number field displays a numeric keypad with large buttons designed for quick, accurate entry.
Optimize mobile page loading times
Mobile speed optimization is a factor because even tenths of a second move money. Deloitte’s analysis of more than 30 million mobile sessions found that a 0.1-second improvement in load time correlated with an 8.4% increase in retail conversions and a 9.2% increase in average order value.
On Shopify, the checkout runs on Shopify’s infrastructure, so the speed you control sits earlier in your theme. The target is set by Google’s Core Web Vitals: a Largest Contentful Paint of less than 2.5 seconds, which doubles as a ranking signal, so a faster store earns search visibility on top of the conversions.
The Shopify App Store has a dedicated category of mobile site speed optimization apps that handle image compression, lazy loading, and script deferral.
How Shop Pay improves mobile conversion
If mobile checkout turns a purchase into a form-filling exercise, Shop Pay removes much of that work. Returning shoppers don’t need to re-enter shipping addresses, billing information, or card details. Their information is stored securely and prefilled, turning a multi-field form into a few taps.
That speed is one reason Shop Pay converts as well as it does. Shopify reports that Shop Pay can increase checkout conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout, and the gains are strongest on mobile devices, where every field and keyboard switch adds friction.
5. Recover lost checkouts and extend the funnel
Those who abandon a cart haven’t always decided against buying; some will come back if you give them a reason to.
Abandoned cart email automations
Klaviyo’s 2026 report ranks abandoned-cart flows as the single highest-revenue automation type a store can run. They average a $3.07 revenue per recipient, with a 2.68% placed order rate.
On Shopify, this is built in for you. The abandoned-checkout template fires a recovery email to shoppers who entered their details and left, with an editable wait time, subject line, and an optional discount to pull them back. For deeper segmentation, like different messages by cart value, you can also route the automation through Shopify Flow.
Or connect Klaviyo, the most widely used email and CRM platforms in the Shopify network. Shopify reports more than 117,000 brands run both, averaging 62% GMV growth in the 12 months after adopting the pair.
Customize your checkout for upsells
Once a shopper has paid, Shopify can show a post-purchase page with a relevant add-on before the order confirmation page. Shoppers can accept in one tap—with no card re-entry.
This is one piece of Checkout Extensibility, Shopify’s framework for customizing checkout through apps instead of direct code edits. The post-purchase page and the Thank You and Order Status pages are available on every plan except Shopify Starter. Businesses on any plan can install upsell apps from the Shopify App Store to add this functionality.
More advanced checkout customization requires Shopify Plus. That includes customizing the steps before payment, like modifying the information, shipping, and payment steps of checkout, plus access to the Checkout Editor and checkout-specific Shopify Functions.
Luggage brand Monos, for example, used Checkout Extensibility to add checkout upsells like protective covers and a shipping-insurance add-on without custom code. The team saved over 10 hours of development work a month.
“Speed is a big part of the reason we went with Checkout Extensibility in the first place. Faster checkouts make buyers more confident in their purchases, which helps us improve conversion and reduce checkout abandonment,” says Jake Fox, senior ecommerce developer at Monos.
How to measure and improve checkout performance
A checkout can be fast and clean and still lose shoppers at one step. Overall conversion rate tells you that sales are being lost, but not at which step.
The answer is to measure the checkout funnel itself.
Checkout funnel metrics to track
Three metrics will tell you where shoppers are dropping off:
- Conversion rate. This is the share of sessions that become orders. Dynamic Yield’s network puts the global average around 2.66% over the past 12 months, though it swings widely by industry and device.
- Cart abandonment rate. This tells you the percentage of shoppers who add a product to their cart but leave without completing a purchase. Baymard estimates it at 70.22%, but per Dynamic Yield’s April 2026 data, it sits at 77.68%, on average.
- Drop-off by step. Checkout is a sequence, and you can measure how many shoppers make it past each stage. If most people reach the shipping step but far fewer continue past it, that’s your problem spot, and probably the place to look first.
This is built into Shopify. The Conversion rate breakdown report in Analytics charts the funnel as a single view, so the stage with the steepest fall is the one to investigate.
A/B testing checkout changes
Even though finding the leak tells you where to work, it doesn’t tell you what to change. That’s what A/B testing is for.
For example, online bookstore World of Books, after replatforming onto Shopify, measured the new build against its old one across the full funnel. This included sessions, search, add to cart, checkout entry, conversion, and revenue per session.
They then used that data to settle which performed better; the new setup won, with conversion up around 10% across every region tested.
“We can move really quickly and really understand how our customers are engaging with our product in a data-led way, and that’s really powerful for us,” says David Magee, World of Books’ product director.
On the Shopify Plus plan, store owners can use a tool like Intelligems to split-test shipping rates, free-shipping thresholds, trust badges, and checkout messaging across live traffic, then read which version made more money.
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Checkout optimization FAQ
What is the average ecommerce checkout conversion rate?
Across Dynamic Yield’s network, the global ecommerce conversion rate averages around 2.66% over the past 12 months, though performance swings widely by industry, region, and device. Your own trend over time tells you far more about your checkout experience than a global average can.
The number worth watching is where shoppers drop inside your ecommerce checkout process, since that’s what you can fix.
What causes cart abandonment at checkout?
According to DHL’s 2026 ecommerce trends report, unexpected shipping costs are the biggest reason for cart abandonment. Baymard finds that forced account creation and a complicated checkout process drive much of the rest, which is why a guest checkout option and a shorter form recover so many of those carts.
How does one-page checkout improve conversions?
A one-page checkout collapses the steps a shopper moves through, so there’s less friction between adding to cart and paying. Fewer page loads and a single continuous flow reduce the points where someone can stall or second-guess, which is the core of checkout process optimization.
This works best alongside the rest of how you optimize checkout, like a guest option, autofill, and clear costs up front.
What is checkout extensibility in Shopify?
Checkout Extensibility is Shopify’s framework for customizing the checkout experience through apps and UI extensions instead of editing code. You can add upsells, trust badges, custom fields, and post-purchase offers safely, without risking the checkout code itself.
Does offering more payment options increase checkout conversion?
Yes, meeting shoppers’ expected payment methods at checkout removes a common reason to abandon. Offering multiple payment options lets shoppers pay the way they prefer, and Stripe’s testing found surfacing relevant local methods lifted conversion 7.4%.
More payment options also support customer satisfaction by making the last step feel effortless.
