Shopify Checkout Optimization: 15 Fixes Ranked by Impact

Most Shopify checkout advice was written for stores that can rebuild their checkout. Most stores can’t. Unless you are on Shopify Plus, you cannot touch the code, add custom fields at will, or move things around, so half the tactics in the average listicle are things you are not allowed to do.

That sounds like bad news. It is the opposite. It means Shopify checkout optimization, for the store you actually run, comes down to a short list of settings and a set of fixes that live before the checkout, where you still have full control and where most sales are won or lost anyway. This guide is that short list, 15 fixes ranked by how much each one moves checkout completion, with the data behind every claim and a clear note on which ones need Plus and which anyone can do this afternoon.

First, what you can actually change

Before the ranking, the constraint that shapes all of it, because no other guide seems to state it plainly.

In September 2023 Shopify rolled out one-page checkout to every plan, from Basic upwards. Around the same time it began retiring checkout.liquid, the old theme file that let developers hand-build the checkout, and replaced it with a system called checkout extensibility. The practical result is a clean split.

If you are on a standard plan (Basic, Shopify or Advanced), you can change the checkout’s logo, colours and typography, pick the one-page layout, turn on Shop Pay and the express wallets, allow guest checkout, set your shipping and duties behaviour, and add checkout apps that Shopify has approved. You cannot rewrite the flow, add arbitrary fields, or reposition elements with code. The checkout is deliberately locked down, which is annoying if you want a bespoke design and a gift if you don’t, because Shopify’s defaults are already fairly well optimised and hard to break.

If you are on Shopify Plus, you get the full checkout editor and checkout UI extensions: drag-and-drop app blocks, custom fields, repositioned content, delivery-date and trust modules, and Shopify Functions for custom discounts, shipping and payment logic. Real control, at the plan price to match. Building any of it properly is usually an agency job, and our guide to choosing a Shopify Plus agency covers how to verify one before you brief them.

Hold that split in your head as you read, because it changes what “optimise your checkout” even means for you. For most stores it means: get the settings right, add a couple of good apps, and fix the pages the shopper hits before the checkout ever loads. That is where this list starts.

How the 15 are ranked

Ranked by expected impact on checkout completion for a typical non-Plus Shopify store, weighted two ways: how large the leak is in the abandonment data, and how many stores actually have that leak open. A fix that plugs the reason 40% of people quit outranks a clever tweak that helps a handful. Each fix carries the plan you need and the effort involved, so you can start at the top and stop when you run out of time. The uncomfortable truth built into the order: the top of this list is almost all settings and pricing, not design.

The shape of the problem, so the ranking has something to stand on. Baymard Institute, which has run checkout usability research for over a decade, puts average documented cart abandonment at 70.22%, a figure that has barely moved in years. Strip out the browsers who were never going to buy and the stated reasons for abandoning read like a to-do list: 40% left because extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) were too high, 20% because delivery was too slow, 19% because they did not trust the site with their card, 18% because they were forced to create an account, 17% because the checkout was too long or complicated, and 12% because they could not see the total cost up front. Notice how many of those are about money and trust, not pixels. The ranking follows the data.

The 15 fixes, ranked

Now the detail, tier by tier. The first four are where almost all the money is.

1. Turn on Shop Pay and the express wallets

This is the highest-return five minutes in Shopify checkout optimisation. Shop Pay and the express wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal) let a returning shopper skip the entire form and pay in a couple of taps, which removes friction exactly where ready buyers hesitate.

The headline number comes from Shopify, so treat it as a vendor figure: a study it commissioned with a large consulting firm put Shop Pay’s conversion lift at up to 50% versus guest checkout. Discount the exact percentage if you like, but the mechanism is not in doubt: fewer taps, no re-typing, a checkout that recognises the shopper. It is free to switch on and available on every plan, so the only real question is why it would ever be off.

One placement detail matters more than any other on mobile: make sure the express wallet buttons sit above the email field, not below the form, so a returning shopper can pay before they ever start typing. It is the single highest-leverage mobile checkout change there is.

2. Show the full cost before the checkout

The biggest single reason people abandon is not a design flaw, it is a nasty surprise. Baymard finds 40% abandon because extra costs were too high, and a further 12% because they could not see the total cost up front. Together that is the largest recoverable leak in the whole funnel, and it is a pricing and transparency problem, not a checkout-layout one.

The fix is to make the all-in number visible early. Show a shipping estimate on the cart, or a clear delivery-cost line before the shopper commits, so the total at the payment step matches what they already expected. If your margins allow it, a free-shipping threshold does double duty: it removes the surprise and nudges basket size. What you must not do is bury the shipping cost until the final screen and hope momentum carries them through. It doesn’t. It just teaches them your checkout can’t be trusted with a straight answer.

3. Allow guest checkout

Forcing account creation is a self-inflicted wound: 18% of shoppers abandon rather than register with a store they are still deciding to trust. On Shopify this is a setting, not a project. Under Settings, Checkout, set customer accounts to optional so no one is stopped at the door.

You still get the customer. Shop Pay captures returning shoppers, and you can invite an account after the purchase, once they have a reason to want one. Ask for the commitment before the sale and you lose some of the sale. Ask after, and you keep both.

4. Use one-page checkout and cut every field you can

Length is the friction people can feel. Baymard finds 17% abandon because the checkout was too long or complicated, and that the average US checkout shows 23.48 form elements when an ideal flow needs about 12. You cannot hand-build Shopify’s fields, but you have more control than you think. Choose the one-page layout so the whole thing reads as a single, short task. Don’t add optional fields (a “company name” box, a “how did you hear about us” prompt) into the checkout itself; put those elsewhere. Keep phone number optional unless the courier truly needs it. Every field you remove is a small reason to leave that you have taken away.

5. Offer the payment methods your buyers expect

A shopper who can’t pay the way they want doesn’t email you, they leave, and DHL’s 2026 research puts that at 62% who will abandon if their preferred method isn’t offered. The right set varies by market: cards and PayPal almost everywhere, Apple Pay and Google Pay for mobile, and a buy-now-pay-later option for higher-ticket baskets, where spreading the cost genuinely changes the yes (Shopify reports around one in four retailers see a 50% lift in average order value after adding Shop Pay Installments, a vendor figure, but the direction is clear). Shopify Payments and the app ecosystem make most of these a toggle. The discipline is to match your actual customers, not to bolt on every option going, since a wall of unfamiliar logos reads as clutter rather than choice.

6. Make security obvious at the payment step

Nineteen percent of abandoners don’t trust the site with their card. Shopify’s checkout is genuinely secure, but security you can’t see does nothing for a nervous shopper. Keep the recognised payment badges visible at the point of entry, make sure your domain and branding are consistent so the checkout doesn’t feel like it threw them to a stranger, and don’t undercut the moment with a janky third-party pop-up firing over the payment fields. Trust is quietest exactly when it matters most.

7. State delivery and returns terms where the doubt appears

Two more stated reasons sit here: 20% leave because delivery is too slow and 13% over an unsatisfactory returns policy. Some of that is real, but a chunk is simply not knowing. Put the delivery estimate and the returns terms where the question forms, on the product page and in the cart, not buried three clicks into a footer policy page. “Free 30-day returns” next to the buy button removes a hesitation before it becomes an exit. If your delivery genuinely is slow, say so early and honestly; a shopper who knows and proceeds is worth ten who find out at the end and bolt.

8. Fix mobile checkout speed

Most of your checkout traffic is on a phone, on a worse connection, with less patience, so speed is not a technical nicety, it is conversion. The best evidence is Deloitte’s Milliseconds Make Millions study, run with Google across 37 brands and more than 30 million sessions: improving mobile site speed by just 0.1 seconds lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. Read that backwards and every heavy script you carry into the checkout is taxing your revenue.

The levers on Shopify are unglamorous and effective. Compress and correctly size images, cut apps you are not actively using (each injects code that runs on load), and be ruthless with third-party scripts, chat widgets and pixels. Then check the result in Shopify’s own speed report and Google’s PageSpeed Insights, on mobile, because that is the number that pays.

9. Get the mobile mechanics right

Speed gets them to the checkout; mechanics get them through it. The good news is Shopify’s checkout already does the hard parts: address autocomplete is built in, and the express wallets handle the worst of the typing. Your job is to not undo it. Make sure your theme’s cart and product pages hand off cleanly to the checkout, that the call-to-action is reachable without a hunt, and that anything you add through an app respects mobile tap targets and the correct keyboard type for each field. Small stuff, but it is the difference between a thumb gliding through and a thumb giving up.

10. Build an abandoned-checkout recovery flow

Even a very good store loses most of its checkouts, because 70.22% abandonment is the baseline, not a failing grade. You cannot prevent all of it, so recover a slice. An abandoned-checkout email or SMS flow follows up with people who got as far as entering details and then stalled, which is the warmest audience you will ever contact: they have already told you they wanted the thing. Shopify has a basic recovery email built in, and Klaviyo or similar will do it with more nuance. If you build one automation this quarter, build this one.

11. Capture the email before they go

Recovery only works if you have a way to reach them. Accelerated checkout captures returning shoppers automatically, but for first-timers who are just browsing, a light email or SMS capture (ideally for something small in return) turns a not-ready visitor into someone you can bring back when they are. Keep it out of the checkout itself, where it is friction, and put it on the pages before.

12. Add a post-purchase upsell on the thank-you page

This one raises average order value rather than checkout completion, which is why it sits below the conversion fixes, but it is close to free money because it happens after the sale is secured. A post-purchase upsell app offers a relevant add-on on the thank-you page, a one-tap yes that risks nothing: if they decline, you still have the original order. Available to any plan through an app. Keep the offer genuinely relevant, or it just reads as a shakedown.

13. Add reassurance modules in-checkout (Plus)

Here the plan line bites. If you are on Shopify Plus, checkout UI extensions let you place trust badges, a delivery-date estimate, gift options or a reassurance line directly in the checkout, on the exact screen where the doubt lives. Done with restraint, it lifts trust at the last edge. Done as a pile of badges and banners, it adds noise and slows the page, so the rule is one clear reassurance, not a collage.

14. Use custom fields and localisation for the buyers who need them (Plus)

Also Plus: custom fields (delivery instructions, gift messages, a VAT or business number for B2B) and deeper localisation for international buyers. For the right store this removes a real blocker, a wholesale customer who needs a PO field, a market that needs local formatting. For most stores it is a marginal gain, which is why it sits near the bottom despite being one of the flashier Plus features.

15. A/B test the checkout itself (Plus, and only with volume)

Testing the checkout is last on purpose, because for most Shopify stores it is the wrong tool. A valid A/B test needs volume most stores don’t have: to detect a modest lift on a checkout at 95% confidence you need thousands of conversions per variation, which is months of waiting for a store doing a few hundred orders a month. By the time it finishes, the result is stale. And meaningful checkout testing needs the control that only Plus provides. So unless you are on Plus and comfortably over roughly 10,000 orders a month, don’t try to test your way to a better checkout. Apply the proven best practice above, which was already validated on millions of sessions you don’t have to reproduce, and spend your testing energy upstream, on the offer, where it actually pays.

When the checkout isn’t the problem

Work down that list and you will fix nearly everything a Shopify store can fix inside and around its checkout. But there is a failure mode no checkout setting touches, and it is worth naming before you spend a month polishing.

Checkout optimisation only helps people who reached the checkout, so it is one piece of the wider Shopify conversion rate picture. If your problem is that warm, relevant traffic browses and leaves without ever adding to cart, the leak is upstream, on the product page or, more often, in the offer itself: the product, the price, the positioning. No checkout tweak fixes an offer the market has quietly declined. I have watched founders shorten forms and add trust badges for months while the actual issue was that the thing, at that price, to those people, was a no.

You can usually tell them apart from your funnel. Lots of add-to-carts and few completed checkouts is a checkout problem, and this list is your fix. Steady traffic that browses and drifts, flat across the funnel, with your fundamentals already sound, is an offer problem, and the answer is to test the offer before you spend behind it, not to keep optimising the store around it. If that is where you are, start with how to test your audience before you spend and the guide to concept testing platforms.

This is the one place my own company fits the problem, so I will say it plainly rather than smuggle it in. TestFeed lets you put a product, price, claim, pack or ad in front of your target shoppers and get back a purchase-intent read, the shoppers’ reasons in their own words, and a clear next move, in days rather than weeks. We built it working with challenger brands like Bae Juice and Sol Bevi. It is a pre-spend, directional signal, not a sales forecast or a guarantee, and it does not judge taste, texture or smell, so it won’t tell you whether the product is nice to use. What it does is stop you optimising a checkout for an offer that was never going to convert. Sort the offer out first, then this list has something worth polishing.

A 30-day checkout fix plan

Week one is the free wins. Turn on Shop Pay and the express wallets, set customer accounts to optional so guests can check out, switch to one-page layout, and surface shipping cost on the cart. That is fixes one through four, most of the abandonment data, done in an afternoon of settings.

Week two is trust and clarity. Add the returns and delivery terms to your product and cart pages, check your payment methods match your buyers, and confirm the security signals are visible at the payment step. Nothing here needs code or Plus.

Week three is speed and mobile. Run your checkout and top product pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile, compress the heavy images, and cut the apps and scripts you are not using. Buy back the tenths of a second that Deloitte’s data says are worth real money.

Week four is recovery. Switch on an abandoned-checkout flow and a light email capture so you stop losing the visitors who weren’t ready today. Then, if warm traffic is browsing and never buying, step back from the checkout entirely and go test the offer, because that is a different leak and a more expensive one.

Frequently asked questions

Can you customise the Shopify checkout without Plus?

Only within limits. Every Shopify plan can set the checkout logo, colours and typography, choose the one-page layout, turn on Shop Pay and express wallets, allow guest checkout, and add approved checkout apps. Deeper changes, such as custom fields, repositioned content and checkout UI extensions, need Shopify Plus. For most stores the highest-impact fixes are settings and the pages before checkout, none of which require Plus.

What is the biggest cause of checkout abandonment?

Unexpected cost. Baymard finds 40% of shoppers who abandon do so because extra costs like shipping, tax or fees were too high, more than any other reason. The fix is transparency: show shipping and the all-in total as early as the product or cart page so the final number is never a surprise.

Does Shop Pay actually increase conversions?

The evidence points that way, though the headline figure comes from Shopify. A study Shopify commissioned with a large consulting firm put Shop Pay’s conversion lift at up to 50% versus guest checkout. Treat the exact number as a vendor figure, but the mechanism is sound: returning shoppers skip the form entirely, and a faster checkout converts better. It is free to switch on, so there is little reason not to.

How many fields should a Shopify checkout have?

As few as the order genuinely needs. Baymard finds the average checkout shows 23.48 form elements when an ideal flow needs about 12. On Shopify you cannot hand-build the fields, but you can avoid adding your own, keep optional fields optional, and let the built-in address autocomplete do the typing for the shopper.

Can I A/B test my Shopify checkout?

Reliable checkout A/B testing needs Shopify Plus and serious volume, roughly thousands of conversions per variation to reach significance. Most stores have neither. Below that, apply proven best practice rather than testing your way to it, watch a handful of real session recordings, and reserve experiments for the offer and pricing decisions that sit upstream of the store.

The short version

Shopify checkout optimisation is not a design project for most stores, because Shopify won’t let it be. It is a handful of settings and a set of fixes that live before the checkout. Turn on Shop Pay, show the full cost early, let guests check out, and shorten the flow, and you have addressed most of the reasons people abandon before you touch anything clever. Add trust, speed and a recovery flow, and you have done nearly everything a non-Plus store can. Save real checkout testing for the day you are on Plus with the volume to justify it, and spend the energy you saved on the offer itself, because a checkout can only ever finish a sale the offer already started.