The average cart abandonment rate sits at around 70%. That means seven out of ten shoppers who add products to their cart leave without completing the purchase. While some abandonment is inevitable — comparison shopping, saving for later — a significant portion is caused by checkout friction. Here is how to optimise your Shopify checkout to recover those lost sales.
Shopify's One-Page Checkout
Shopify introduced one-page checkout to replace the traditional multi-step process. This consolidation reduces perceived effort — customers see the entire checkout on a single page rather than wondering how many steps remain. If your store has not migrated to the one-page checkout, this should be your first priority. Shopify reports an average 4% increase in conversion rates for stores using the new checkout.
For Shopify Plus merchants, Checkout Extensibility provides additional customisation options. You can add custom fields, loyalty programme integrations, and personalised upsell offers directly within the checkout using checkout UI extensions. This replaces the old checkout.liquid approach with a more maintainable, upgrade-safe system.
Payment Options That Convert
Limited payment options are a leading cause of checkout abandonment. Offer the payment methods your customers expect:
- Shop Pay: Shopify's accelerated checkout saves customer details for one-tap purchasing. It converts 1.72x better than standard checkouts according to Shopify's data.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay: Digital wallet users expect to pay with a fingerprint or face scan. These eliminate the need to type card details entirely.
- Buy now, pay later: Services like Klarna, Afterpay, or Shop Pay Installments can increase average order value by 20-30% by reducing the perceived cost barrier.
- Local payment methods: For European customers, consider PayPal, iDEAL (Netherlands), Bancontact (Belgium), and other region-specific options.
Trust Signals and Transparency
Customers abandon checkout when they do not trust the store or when unexpected costs appear. Display shipping costs, taxes, and delivery estimates as early as possible — ideally on the product page or in the cart, before checkout begins. Unexpected costs at checkout are the number one reason for cart abandonment.
Add trust badges, security icons, and your return policy prominently in the checkout. Customer reviews, money-back guarantees, and SSL indicators reassure hesitant buyers. For Malta-based stores selling internationally, displaying EU consumer protection information builds additional confidence.
Guest Checkout and Account Creation
Forcing account creation before purchase is one of the biggest conversion killers. Always offer guest checkout as the default option. If you want to encourage account creation, offer it after the purchase is complete — the customer is already committed and more likely to create an account to track their order.
Shop Pay effectively solves this problem by providing a universal account that works across all Shopify stores. Customers who have used Shop Pay anywhere can check out with saved information on your store, combining the convenience of an account with the low friction of guest checkout.
Post-Abandonment Recovery
Even with an optimised checkout, some abandonment is unavoidable. Shopify's built-in abandoned checkout recovery emails are a starting point, but a dedicated email sequence performs significantly better. Send the first recovery email within one hour, a second after 24 hours, and a third after 72 hours — potentially with a small incentive like free shipping or a modest discount.
At Born Digital, we have helped Shopify merchants reduce cart abandonment by 15-25% through systematic checkout optimisation. The combination of reducing friction, adding payment options, and implementing recovery sequences creates a compounding improvement in revenue. If you are losing sales at checkout, let us audit your flow and identify the highest-impact improvements.