Shopify Checkout Optimization: How to Get More Customers to Complete Purchases

Summary: Roughly seven out of ten Shopify shoppers add something to their cart and then leave without buying. This guide breaks down why that happens, what the data says about fixable checkout friction, and the specific changes – from cart page tweaks to one-page checkout – that actually move the needle on Shopify checkout optimization.

Shopify checkout optimization is the process of identifying and removing friction in a Shopify store’s checkout flow. This includes things like unnecessary form fields, hidden costs, forced account creation, and slow load times to increase the percentage of shoppers who complete their purchase. 

According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate sits at 70.22%. A large share of this is directly tied to checkout design decisions a store owner can actually fix.

If you’re running a Shopify store and your add-to-cart numbers look healthy while your sales stay flat, the checkout is usually where you should be looking. Not the ad spend. Not the product photos. The checkout.

Let’s get into why that gap exists and what to do about it.

Why Checkout Friction Costs You More Than You Think

Here’s the part that tends to surprise store owners: most abandoned carts aren’t lost to competitors or bad products. They’re lost to friction that shows up in the final few steps. 

Baymard Institute’s research, drawn from a meta-analysis of 50 separate studies, puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22% – a number that’s barely budged in over a decade despite huge investment in ecommerce UX across the industry. When Baymard asked shoppers why they abandoned a cart (excluding people who were just browsing), the top reasons were almost entirely checkout-related:

• 40% abandoned because extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) were too high
• 20% left because delivery was too slow
• 19% didn’t trust the site with their payment information
• 18% didn’t want to create an account 
• 17% found the checkout too long or complicated
• 17% hit site errors or crashes

That list matters because none of it is unfixable. Baymard’s own checkout research found that a well-designed Shopify checkout flow can run as few as 12-14 form elements, yet the average checkout across the sites they benchmark shows 23.48 form elements by default. 

That’s nearly double what shoppers actually need to complete an order – and every extra field is another moment for someone to hesitate, get distracted, or just give up.

Baymard estimates that fixing solvable checkout usability issues alone can lift conversion by an average of 35.26% for large ecommerce sites, translating to roughly $260 billion in recoverable orders across the US and EU. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s money sitting on the table because of checkout design, not product-market fit.

What “Good” Actually Looks Like on Shopify

Shopify has an advantage here that platform-agnostic stores don’t: a checkout built and continuously refined at massive scale. In a 2023 study Shopify commissioned with a global management consulting firm, Shopify’s checkout was found to convert up to 36% higher than competing platforms, averaging 15% higher across the board. 

The baseline matters, but it’s still just a baseline – plenty of Shopify merchants leave conversion on the table by not using what’s already built into the platform, or by adding friction through apps, upsells, and custom fields that weren’t stress-tested for usability.

The same study found that Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, can lift conversion by as much as 50% compared to a standard guest checkout, and simply having Shop Pay visible as an option can lift lower-funnel conversion by around 5%. Part of that comes down to speed – Shop Pay recognizes returning customers and pre-fills their information. This makes checkout roughly four times faster than typing everything in manually. 

So when people ask what the best checkout for Shopify actually looks like, the honest answer is: it’s less about picking a fancy third-party checkout app and more about configuring what Shopify already gives you correctly, then removing the things getting in its way.

The Case for One-Page Checkout

A lot of merchants ask whether they should switch to a one page checkout Shopify setup instead of the default multi-step flow. It’s a fair question, and the answer depends on your product and audience more than most “best practice” articles admit. 

A one step checkout Shopify experience – where shipping, billing, and payment all live on a single screen – tends to work well for stores with a simple, low-consideration purchase: one product in the cart, a straightforward shipping model, no complex customization. The logic is simple: fewer page loads, fewer decision points, less chance for someone to close the tab.

Multi-step checkout, on the other hand, often performs better for stores with more complexity – multiple shipping options, gift messaging, subscription add-ons, or higher price points where buyers want to feel like they’re reviewing details carefully before confirming. 

Breaking the process into clear stages (contact info → shipping → payment) with a visible progress indicator can actually build more trust than cramming everything onto one screen, especially for first-time buyers who are still deciding whether they trust your source.

The point isn’t that one-page checkout is universally superior. It’s that checkout optimization means testing which structure fits your specific buyer behaviour, not copying whatever a competitor is doing.

Fixing the Cart Page Before You Touch Checkout

Here’s something that gets skipped constantly: Shopify cart page optimization happens before checkout optimization, and it directly affects how many people even make it to the checkout screen in the first place.

A few things worth checking on your cart page:

1. Cost Transparency

If shipping costs or taxes only show up at the final step, you’re setting up the single biggest abandonment trigger Baymard identified – the 40% of shoppers who leave over unexpected extra costs. Show estimated shipping on the cart page itself, even if it’s a range.

2. Clear Next Step

The “Checkout” button should be the most visually dominant element on the page. If your cart page has five competing CTAs (continue shopping, apply coupon, checkout, save for later, view shipping estimate), you’re diluting the one action that actually matters.

3. Trust Signals in View

Security badges, a clear returns policy link, and accepted payment icons reduce the hesitation that shows up right before someone clicks through to pay. 

4. Editable Quantities and Variants

Forcing someone back to the product page to change a size or color adds a step that increases the odds they don’t come back at all.

None of this is glamorous work, but it’s the kind of thing that compounds. A cart page that removes doubt sends more qualified traffic into your checkout – which makes every other optimization you make there more effective.

A Practical Checklist for Shopify Checkout Optimization

If you want a starting point rather than a full audit, here’s where to focus first:

1. Audit your form fields: Count how many fields appear by default. If you’re anywhere near Baymard’s 23-field average, look for fields you can remove, combine, or make optional (a second address line, a company name field, a phone number that isn’t strictly needed).

2. Enable Shop Pay and make it visible: Given the documented lift in conversion, this is close to a no-brainer for most stores.

3. Offer guest checkout by default: Forcing account creation before purchase is still one of the most common reasons shoppers cite for abandoning, according to Baymard’s data above.

4. Show total costs early: Shipping calculators or flat-rate shipping displayed on the cart page prevent sticker shock at the final step.

5. Test your mobile checkout specifically: Mobile traffic converts at a meaningfully lower rate than desktop across most benchmarks, and a checkout that feels fine on a laptop can be genuinely frustrating to complete on a phone with small tap targets or slow-loading payment fields. 

6. Reduce redirects and load time: Every extra second of load time between “click checkout” and “see payment form” is another chance for someone to lose momentum.

Where Store UX Audit Fits In

This is the part of the work we spend most of our time on at Store UX Audit – going through a live Shopify checkout screen by screen, comparing it against documented usability research, and flagging exactly where shoppers are most likely dropping off. It’s rarely one big broken thing. It’s usually four or five smaller frictions stacked together, each one shaving off a percentage of buyers who were otherwise ready to pay. 

Shopify checkout optimization isn’t a one-time project you finish and forget. Buyer behaviour shifts, Shopify updates its checkout features regularly, and what worked for your store a year ago might be quietly costing you conversions today. Treat it the way you’d treat page speed or SEO: something you check on a regular cadence, not something you fix once and walk away from.

The Bottom Line

The data is consistent across every major source: most cart abandonment isn’t about price or product. It’s about friction that shows up between “add to cart’ and “order confirmed”. Baymard Institute’s research puts a real number on it – a 35.26% average conversion lift is achievable through checkout design improvements alone, and features like Shop Pay and a well-configured Shopify checkout can meaningfully outperform the alternative.

Start with your cart page, tighten your checkout flow, cut fields you don’t need, and be upfront about costs. None of it requires a rebuild. It requires paying attention to the part of your store that’s already doing the hardest job – closing the sale.

Not sure where your checkout is actually losing customers?

Guesswork is expensive when it comes to checkout. If you’d rather know exactly which steps in your Shopify checkout flow are costing you sales instead of guessing. Get a free Store UX Audit of your checkout and cart pages. We’ll walk through your live store, flag the specific friction points, and hand you a prioritized list of fixes – no generic checklist, just what’s actually happening on your store.