Checkout is the foundation of commerce, and we can now definitively say that Shopify's is the best.
A new external study conducted by a leading global management consulting company analyzed the conversion performance of major commerce platforms as well as custom builds and showed that Shopify's overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and an average of 15%.
It also showed the power of Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout offering. When used, it can lift conversion by as much as 50% compared to guest checkout, outpacing other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%. The mere presence of Shop Pay, according to the study, can increase lower funnel conversion by 5%.
This data is a powerful tool to use with prospective clients, reinforcing Shopify’s four unique checkout advantages: our massive identity network, unmatched scale, consumer trust, and velocity of innovation.
Identity network
The future of commerce is identity-driven, and digital wallets are the vehicle.
More and more brands are realizing the conversion benefits of removing friction and reducing the overall steps required at checkout, and no other wallet does this better than Shop Pay, in large part due to its massive identity network.
Over 100 million high-intent, high-value buyers are pre-opted into one-click checkout with Shop Pay. It’s the single most popular and trusted digital wallet on Shopify.
When a prospective customer with a Shop Pay account hits a storefront, Shopify can recognize them with one click. At checkout, it can even recognize the majority of them without any user action if they've used Shop Pay recently. That enables Shop Pay to pre-fill customer information for a seamless one-click checkout, which means a 4x faster experience than a guest checkout.
Brands that provide personalized experiences to their customers, including a checkout they know and trust, are able to remove some of the friction within the buying journey to ensure higher conversion. Shop Pay is an ideal solution for these retailers and a proven way to increase conversion.
The massive identity network, ease of use, and extensibility of Shop Pay is even more powerful with the support of Shop Pay Installments and Shop Cash. They create a win-win checkout experience for shoppers and merchants alike—and ultimately increase conversion by as much as 50% compared to guest checkouts.
Scale
For Shopify, scale is both an asset we use to improve checkout and something we can handle with ease. It's what allows us to power millions of brands and build with the largest enterprises in the world.
Shopify currently powers approximately 10% of U.S. ecommerce, has processed over half a trillion dollars of GMV, and supported 561 million unique online shoppers in 2022. We leverage this unmatched volume of data to improve checkout at an amazing pace. This includes smaller changes, like optimizations in button display and field order, as well as bigger changes like our recent introduction of one-page checkout.
Our customers' experience is the most important thing to us. They need to trust our checkout as much as they trust our products—and recognize the path to purchase as easily as they recognize our brand.
Shopify Checkout also handles the most important annual sales events with throughputs that would take down most commerce platforms and custom builds, but shine on Shopify. Our peak holiday sales event in 2022, for example, netted $7.5 billion in total sales, with Shopify Checkout processing $3.5 million in sales per minute. We’ve even seen a brand have more than 40,000 buyers checking out at the same time, continuously for a few minutes, without so much as a hiccup. If it’s reliable for the largest flash sellers in the world, it’s reliable for all sellers.
As a partner, you can have confidence knowing the customers who hit your client’s checkout are going to have a great buying experience, for the big moments that count and every moment in between.
Consumer trust
Hundreds of millions of people use a Shopify Checkout every year. The look, feel, and flow of our checkout has become highly recognizable, and therefore trusted.
But Shopify Checkout isn’t just a familiar experience, it’s a delightful one. It’s seamless, fast, and unfussy—and built to deliver what your clients need to meet customer expectations, like delivery promises, BOPIS, tax and duty calculation, post-purchase expectations, discounts, and more.
The seamless experience of Shopify Checkout is the byproduct of many features working together in perfect harmony and the perfect foundation for you to build a standout checkout experience for brands.
Consumers know, trust, and love Shopify Checkout. It’s no wonder its conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36%.
Innovation
At Shopify, we have larger teams working just on innovating checkout than some other platforms have on their entire commerce solution. Building on our platform ensures your clients are always on the cutting edge of checkout technology.
But checkout isn’t a walled garden—what makes it so innovative is that it enables you to innovate.
Shopify provides all the essential components while allowing businesses to innovate and customize to fit their needs. The toolkit of options is endless, depending on what’s most important to your clients. You can mix and match bespoke code written in custom apps with no-code, easily configurable apps for your Shopify store to lower total cost of ownership, increase speed to market, and pivot to shifting buyer demands quickly. This is the power of checkout extensibility.
But it doesn't stop there. Checkout extensibility is fully compatible with Shop Pay, making it the only fully customizable one-click checkout. You can customize Shop Pay's look and feel, and add functionality either through click-and-configure apps or by building bespoke apps for your customizations.
Shopify’s Checkout allows us to build exactly what our clients want without sacrificing performance or innovation. This is critical for us when making recommendations on which platform clients should use, and a main reason we continue to recommend Shopify.
New sales enablement resources for partners
We’ve been working on our checkout for nearly two decades, and we’ve learned a lot. When you’ve got 10% of all ecommerce orders in the U.S. going through the platform, there are compounding effects and improved efficiencies that every one of your clients will benefit from.
To learn how to leverage this new research in prospect conversations, check out the sales enablement toolkit now live in your partner dashboard. The toolkit includes specific conversion benchmarks across platforms and accelerated checkouts, as well as more details on the methodology used.
