How Adding Express Payments Boosted Checkout Completion by 18%

Checkout abandonment is the most expensive leak in any ecommerce funnel. Of all the interventions available to reduce it, enabling accelerated payment methods is one of the fastest and highest-impact. For a health and wellness brand on Shopify, adding Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay to their checkout increased completion by 18% in under a month.

Why Checkout Friction Matters

The Baymard Institute estimates the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70%. Requiring a customer to type their full name, address, card number, expiry, and CVV is a significant ask — particularly on mobile. Accelerated payment methods collapse this process into a single biometric confirmation.

What We Enabled

• Shop Pay — one-tap checkout using saved Shopify network data
• Apple Pay — Touch ID / Face ID checkout on Safari and iOS
• Google Pay — one-tap checkout on Chrome and Android
• Express payment buttons surfaced on product pages, not just cart

Product Page Express Checkout

A key change was surfacing express payment buttons directly on product pages, not just at the cart stage. This allows customers to bypass the cart entirely — a particularly high-converting path for mobile users browsing a specific product. The 'buy with' buttons were styled to match the brand and placed immediately below the 'add to basket' CTA.

Results

• Checkout completion rate: up 18% overall
• Mobile checkout completion: up 29%
• Average checkout time: reduced from 3.2 minutes to 48 seconds for express users
• No negative impact on fraud rates or chargebacks

If your Shopify store does not yet have accelerated payments enabled and surfaced prominently, it is likely the single highest-ROI change you can make this month. The setup time is minimal; the impact is immediate.