Shopify Checkout is the best-converting in the world. Here’s why.

Everyone says their product is the best, so when we say “Shopify has the world’s best-converting checkout,” why would you believe us?

That’s why we partnered with one of the Big Three global management consulting companies, gave them all of our data, asked them to study the checkouts of all major commerce platforms on the planet, and committed to publish the results of the report no matter what.

After months of independent study, this leading global management consulting company found that Shopify’s overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and by 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%. 

How have we built the world’s best-converting checkout? It boils down to four advantages: Shopify’s massive identity network, unmatched scale, consumer trust, and velocity of innovation.

When leveraging like-for-like samples, Shopify outperforms the competition by up to 36% and by 15.2% on average. Some of those peers are depicted here.

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 customers 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 checkout than a guest checkout. 

When a prospective customer with a Shop Pay account hits a storefront, Shopify can recognize them with one click. 

“Brands that provide personalized experiences to their customers, including a supporting 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.” – Travis Hess, EVP of DTC at The Stable, Part of Accenture Song

The massive identity network, ease of use, and extensibility of Shop Pay translates to buyers converting up to 50% more than when using guest checkout.  

We see great power in recognition, confirmed by this data. If you’re a Shop Pay customer, you’ve experienced it. It’s the magic of being known in a way that’s abundantly helpful to you; a handshake of information where the benefits to consumers far outweigh the costs.

The future of commerce is bright, one where the confluence of identity and value exchange are intrinsically connected. Shop Pay Installments, Shop Cash, and other innovative financial service and loyalty offerings are all working together, directly in our identity wallet. All made possible by the scale of Shopify’s checkout.

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 ~10% of U.S. ecommerce, has processed over half a trillion dollars of GMV, and supported 561 million unique online shoppers in 2022 alone. 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 announcement of one-page checkout.

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 performant for the largest flash sellers in the world, it’s performant for all sellers.

For the big moments that count, and every moment in between, Shopify Checkout is the battle-tested platform businesses can trust. 

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 immediately trusted. 

But Shopify Checkout isn’t just a familiar experience, it’s a delightful one. It’s seamless, fast, and unfussy—not to mention full of options that consumers expect like discounts and gift cards, delivery promises, local pickup, tax and duty calculation, post-purchase offers, and more. Making something seem this simple is actually an incredibly complex undertaking. The smooth experience of Shopify Checkout is the byproduct of many sophisticated features working together in perfect harmony, while supporting each business’s unique needs and logic.

Consumers know, trust, and love Shopify. It’s no wonder its conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36%.

“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.” – Kyla Robinson, Vice President, Digital Product, Spanx

Innovation

At Shopify, we have more engineers working just on making checkout high-converting and performant, than some other companies have working on their entire commerce solution. Building on our platform ensures you’re always on the cutting edge of checkout technology.  

“At Shopify, we have more engineers working just on making checkout high-converting and performant, than some other companies have working on their entire commerce solution.”

But checkout isn’t a walled garden—what makes it so innovative is that it enables you to innovate. 

Shopify provides all the essential checkout components while allowing brands to customize it to fit their needs. You can mix and match solutions like bespoke code written in custom apps and no-code, easily configurable apps for your Shopify store to lower your 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 & feel, and add functionality either through click and configure apps or by building bespoke apps for your customizations. 

We’ve been working on our checkout for nearly two decades, and we’ve learned a lot. When you have 10% of all ecommerce orders in the U.S. going through the platform, there are compounding benefits and improved efficiencies everyone on the platform will benefit from.

This study confirms what we, and businesses that have moved to Shopify, already knew—that Shopify Checkout is the best-converting checkout in the world.