The best e-commerce platform for checkout conversion

Shop Pay is included as part of Shopify Payments, so a store on Shopify's own processor has a saved-shopper wallet in its checkout. We crown Shopify for checkout conversion on that wallet and on the experiments in Shopify's Rollouts documentation, which compare a checkout change against a control. A report by BCG and Shopify measured an average lift of approximately 5% in lower-funnel conversion, the share of started checkouts that get completed, when Shop Pay is present.

BigCommerce suits a team whose developers want to fork its open-source checkout code and host it themselves, with payments on a supported provider such as Stripe or PayPal. WooCommerce suits a store that is staying on WordPress and wants to edit its checkout fields with no monthly platform subscription, provided the team has the technical capacity to keep extensions and payment gateways compatible.

What decides checkout conversion on a platform

Baymard Institute's list of the reasons US online shoppers gave for abandoning a cart, with those who were only browsing set aside, puts a checkout that was too long or complicated at 17% and too few payment methods at 9%. A saved-shopper wallet bears on both, because it adds a way to pay and fills in a returning buyer's saved details. Each platform's wallet is tied to a payment processor and a set of countries, so it appears only on stores that meet those rules.

The Shop Pay exhibit in the BCG and Shopify report cites internal Shopify data and BCG analysis as its sources. BigCommerce's published rates come from an Incisiv study of stores on its Enterprise plan. Each figure describes one platform's own stores, so read it for its metric and its sample, and treat neither as a forecast for a store outside the group it counted.

Shopify's Help Center limits apps and checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps to its Plus plan, with branding changes open on Basic and above. BigCommerce publishes checkout code a team can fork, and WooCommerce puts field controls in its Checkout block, part of the core plugin that its pricing page lists as free. Editing fields and steps is how a team acts on the long-checkout complaint in Baymard's list, so check whether a plan tier or developer time stands between you and that edit.

A Wharton Mack Institute analysis of 2,732 A/B tests at 252 e-commerce companies found that a promotion's effect changed with its place in the funnel, and that shipping promotions worked best on product and checkout pages. Because effects in that sample varied by funnel position, a team has reason to measure a checkout change in the checkout itself, against a control group.

Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce at checkout

Shopify: Shop Pay in the checkout and experiments to test a change

Shop Pay transactions run at the store's Shopify Payments rates, according to Shopify's Help Center page on Shop Pay, and a shopper saves payment information by entering an email address at checkout. A store on a third-party gateway can offer Shop Pay only if it is located in Australia, France or the United States and meets Shopify Payments requirements for that country, under the eligibility rules on the activation page.

Shopify's case study of BODi, formerly Beachbody, reports a 10 percentage point lift in checkout conversion at launch on Shopify. The case study places further gains after the company enabled Shop Pay.

Rollouts, as Shopify's Help Center describes it, changes a store's theme, its checkout and accounts pages, its discounts or its product catalogs. One of its three types is the Experiment, which "compares a treatment against a control." So a team can run a checkout change as an experiment and read its result against the unchanged checkout.

Standard customization is available on the Basic plan or higher: the logo, background, colors and font, along with eligible apps on the thank you and order status pages. Apps and checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps are available only on Shopify Plus, which the pricing page lists from $2,300 a month. Shopify fits less well for a team on a lower plan that wants apps or extensions on those steps.

BigCommerce: a checkout your developers can fork and host

BigCommerce publishes its checkout as an open-source repository on GitHub, MIT licensed, with a guide to forking and installing it as a custom checkout. Its checkout features page says developers can fork that code and deploy it at their own URL, and that merchants can adjust colors, branding, banners and logo placement from the control panel without code. The developer documentation sets one boundary: the Checkout JS SDK cannot introduce new behavior, so a team can filter the existing shipping and payment methods and cannot create new ones.

Link, the saved-shopper wallet from Stripe, runs on the Stripe Optimized Checkout Suite and becomes available once a store upgrades to it, according to BigCommerce's Stripe page, which gives the upgrade a 30-day revert window. Fastlane by PayPal is supported on the PayPal and Braintree gateways, and it opened to US stores before UK stores. A store connecting PayPal for the first time gets Fastlane added automatically, and a Braintree store has to enable it on its Braintree merchant account first.

BigCommerce's write-up of an Incisiv study covers more than 2,200 merchants on its Enterprise plan using the native checkout in May and June 2023. Checkout conversion was 52.9% for stores without alternative payment methods, 58.9% with PayPal Wallet or Apple Pay, and 61.9% with both. Those rates set Enterprise stores against each other, so they describe the gap between stores with and without those two wallets on that plan. BigCommerce's post on its Stripe integration cites Sarah Raven for a 40% decrease in cart abandonment and an 18% increase in site revenue under the Optimized Checkout Suite, a payment upgrade of which Link is one part.

BigCommerce's A/B testing guide has a section on the checkout process test, which sets a single-page checkout against a multipage one. For running it, the guide lists third-party tools, among them Optimizely and VWO.

WooCommerce: checkout blocks on a WordPress store with no platform subscription

WooCommerce's pricing page describes the core platform as free and open source for WordPress, with no monthly subscription, and leaves the choice of host and paid extensions to the merchant. The Checkout block is part of that core plugin. Its documentation lets a team show or hide the Company, Address Line 2 and Phone fields, set whether the address line and phone are required, turn on numbered steps, and move or rename the blocks inside the checkout.

WooPay is Woo's own saved-shopper wallet. It stores payment information for use across WooCommerce stores that run WooPayments with WooPay enabled, and the WooPay documentation limits it to US merchants and US customers. Link is offered through WooPayments too, for a US-based account and an order paid in USD, and the settings guide says Link and WooPay cannot both be enabled. Fastlane comes through the PayPal Payments extension for an eligible PayPal Business account, and it shows only to guest buyers on the core Checkout block, the Classic Checkout block or the checkout shortcode.

Developers extend the block checkout in JavaScript on the front end and PHP on the back end. WooCommerce's guide to customizing the cart and checkout pages warns that an incompatible gateway or extension can leave checkout elements, payment methods included, unavailable, and that some extensions built for the older shortcode checkout need integration work first. Fastlane carries the same dependency: its documentation lists checkout builders such as CartFlows and FunnelKit as unsupported, and the wallet does not appear on those layouts.

The WooCommerce marketplace lists PostHog Integration, an extension from Tehster priced at $99 for one year, that tracks checkout starts and completed orders and tests checkout layouts through PostHog A/B tests. PostHog is a separate account with a free tier and its own paid upgrades.

Which e-commerce platform is best for checkout conversion?

We crown Shopify because Shop Pay comes with the platform's own payment processor and a published lift, and because a checkout change can be tested against a control inside the platform. Shopify trails on control of the core checkout steps below Plus. Apps and checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps take that plan, where BigCommerce hands developers the checkout code and WooCommerce puts field controls in its free core. We weigh the wallet and the experiment above that control because the wallet arrives with Shopify Payments and the experiment gives a team a way to measure each change it makes afterward.

BigCommerce is the better pick when your developers want to own the checkout code. They fork the open-source checkout and host it at their own URL, with payments on a supported provider such as Stripe or PayPal. Check the SDK boundary before you commit, because a design that depends on creating a new shipping or payment method falls outside it.

WooCommerce is the better pick for a team that is keeping its store on WordPress and wants to edit checkout fields in the core block with no platform subscription. It suits a team with the technical capacity to keep extensions and gateways compatible with the block checkout, and a US store can add WooPay or Link through WooPayments.

Other e-commerce platforms in this category