What Plus merchants get wrong about checkout, and what actually moves the number
Most Plus merchants treat checkout as a finished surface. The flow exists, customers complete orders, the conversion rate is whatever it is. When it underperforms, the team adds an app, tries a new payment provider, or tweaks the layout — and most of those changes produce no measurable difference because they're addressing symptoms rather than the underlying friction.
The merchants who genuinely move checkout conversion aren't doing more sophisticated optimization. They're doing the basic work consistently and well. They've identified where their specific customers drop off, addressed those specific points, and built the discipline to keep the surface clean as the catalog and traffic mix evolve.
Below are the five places Plus merchants most commonly leak checkout conversion, organized by where in the flow the friction actually lives.
The pre-checkout problems that look like checkout problems
Two of the most common "checkout" problems aren't checkout problems at all. They're problems with what customers see before they hit checkout, and they show up as abandonment at the checkout screen because that's where the customer finally encounters the issue.
Unexpected costs surfacing at checkout. A customer adds a product, sees a clear price, proceeds to checkout, and discovers shipping and taxes that weren't visible earlier. The total is now meaningfully higher than they expected. Some customers proceed; many abandon. The merchant blames "checkout" but the actual problem is upstream — the customer formed a price expectation on the product page that the checkout violated.
The diagnostic pattern: if your shipping costs vary by location, weight, or method but aren't shown until the final checkout step, you're surfacing surprise costs at the worst possible moment. The fix isn't checkout optimization — it's surfacing shipping costs earlier, on the cart page or even product pages where possible, so the price the customer sees in checkout matches what they expected.
What good looks like: customers know the all-in cost before they begin checkout. Shipping is calculated and displayed in the cart. Taxes are estimated where geo-detection allows. Free shipping thresholds, if offered, are visible early enough to influence cart-building behavior.
Slow load times before and during checkout. Speed problems on product and cart pages exhaust attention before customers even reach checkout. Speed problems within checkout itself amplify any other friction by giving customers more time to second-guess. Both produce abandonment that looks like checkout failure but starts upstream.
The diagnostic pattern: time the journey from product page click to completed order on a slow connection. If the entire flow takes more than 30 seconds, friction is compounding at every step. Plus merchants who haven't audited speed in 12+ months almost always have degradation here.
What good looks like: cart and checkout pages loading in under 2 seconds on standard mobile connections, with no hidden script bloat from accumulated apps. Speed monitored as part of the checkout health metric, not as a separate concern.
The checkout itself
Three friction points within checkout consistently cost Plus merchants real conversion.
Forms that demand more than necessary. Every field is a chance for a customer to abandon. Plus merchants often accumulate form fields over time — required marketing opt-ins, required phone numbers, required account creation, address fields that don't autofill correctly. Each individual field seems harmless. Together they add up to a checkout that asks for more than the customer wants to give.
The diagnostic pattern: count the required fields in your current checkout flow. If guest checkout is disabled or hidden, account creation is required, or the form is asking for information that isn't strictly needed for fulfillment, you're losing customers who would otherwise buy.
What good looks like: guest checkout is prominent and equal in friction to logged-in checkout. Required fields are limited to what's truly needed for fulfillment. Autofill works for address and payment information. Express checkout options (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay) are visible and prominent, especially on mobile.
Trust signals that don't reach the buyer. Checkout is where customers decide whether to give a stranger their credit card information. The merchants who get this right reinforce trust visibly — payment security iconography, return policy reminders, customer support contact, brand consistency from product page through completion. The merchants who get it wrong assume trust carries over from the rest of the site, when it actually needs to be reaffirmed at the moment of payment.
The diagnostic pattern: pull up your checkout on a mobile device and ask what would convince a first-time customer to complete the purchase. If the page strips most of your branding, hides return policies, or removes the visual cues that reinforced trust elsewhere on the site, you're asking customers to trust an interface that's intentionally minimal.
What good looks like: checkout maintains brand consistency. Trust elements are present without being cluttered — secure payment iconography, clear return policy access, a link to customer support. The page feels like a continuation of the brand experience, not a separate transactional interface.
Limited or poorly-positioned payment options. Not every customer wants to enter a credit card. Plus merchants who don't offer alternative payment methods are forcing a payment preference that doesn't match their customer base. The merchants who get this right offer the methods their customers actually use — Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and increasingly BNPL options for higher-AOV stores — and surface them prominently.
The diagnostic pattern: pull conversion rates by payment method from the last 90 days. If credit card conversion is materially lower than express checkout conversion (Shop Pay, Apple Pay), you have customers who would convert with the right payment option but are abandoning when forced to enter card details manually. The fix is making the better-converting payment methods more prominent, not adding more methods.
What good looks like: the highest-converting payment methods are visible and easy to use, especially on mobile where typing card numbers is the friction point. Payment options match the customer base — younger consumers expect Apple Pay and BNPL, B2B customers may need invoice or net-30 options, international customers need locally relevant methods.
What to do in weeks 1-4 of a 90-day plan
For a Plus merchant whose Conversion gap shows up most clearly in checkout, here's the foundation work for the first month.
Week 1: instrument the actual abandonment. Pull checkout funnel data — how many customers reach checkout, how many complete each step, where the drop-off concentrates. Most merchants discover the problem isn't where they assumed it was.
Week 2: address the upstream issues first. If the data shows abandonment concentrated at the moment shipping costs appear, fix the cost transparency upstream rather than touching checkout. If speed is the problem, address speed before form fields. The biggest gains usually come from upstream fixes.
Week 3: clean up the checkout itself. Remove unnecessary form fields. Enable or prominently surface guest checkout. Make sure express checkout options are visible above the fold on mobile. These changes are usually theme-level work, not requiring full checkout extensibility.
Week 4: instrument and observe. Set up tracking for the metrics that matter — checkout-start to completion rate, cart abandonment by payment method, mobile vs. desktop checkout performance. The instrumentation is what makes future optimization possible.
A Plus merchant who runs this for one month typically recovers 1-3 points of checkout conversion, which compounds across every subsequent customer acquired.
Where this fits in your maturity profile
Checkout discipline is primarily a Conversion lever, but it touches Brand (consistency through the purchase moment), Operations (payment method support, fulfillment workflows), and even Acquisition (paid traffic with poor checkout conversion is meaningfully more expensive). A merchant strong on checkout tends to be operationally tight more broadly; a merchant with checkout friction often has discipline gaps across multiple dimensions.
The Holistic Assessment evaluates your business across all six dimensions of growth and identifies whether Conversion is the dominant gap that should anchor your 90-day plan. It also surfaces specific operational practices — including checkout discipline — that determine whether your conversion work is moving the right metrics.