14 Ways to Increase Checkout Conversions in Your Online Shop

ReseaAccording to research, the average cart abandonment rate across ecommerce sites now sits at just over 70%. 

For a UK online shop that’s put real time and money into its website, that abandonment rate translates directly into lost income, and the majority of it comes down to fixable problems with user experience rather than a genuine lack of buyer intent. 

In the following sections, we’ll walk you through exactly what those problems are and show you what you can do to prevent them.

What Are Checkout Conversions?

A checkout conversion happens when a shopper who reaches your checkout actually completes the purchase, rather than leaving before payment goes through. 

It’s a narrower, more specific measure than overall cart abandonment, and the distinction is worth understanding properly, because the two problems have different causes and different fixes.

What’s the difference between cart abandonment and checkout abandonment?

Cart abandonment covers everyone who adds an item to their basket and never returns. 

This represents a group that includes a large proportion of shoppers who were simply browsing, comparing prices, or saving something for later with no real intention of buying that day. 

Checkout abandonment is narrower and, in many ways, more actionable. It’s specifically the shoppers who had already committed enough to begin the checkout process and still didn’t finish. 

These are the customers who wanted to buy but hit something that changed their mind along the way. This could be an unexpected cost, a form that felt too long, a payment method they didn’t trust, or a website that simply didn’t load fast enough to hold their patience.

How are checkout conversions measured and calculated?

Your checkout conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of completed purchases by the number of shoppers who started the checkout process, expressed as a percentage. 

It matters enormously for ecommerce revenue precisely because these are the shoppers closest to a sale. Improving checkout conversion rate is usually a far more efficient way to grow revenue than trying to attract more visitors to the site in the first place. 

This is because you’re working with people who have already shown clear buying intent rather than trying to persuade someone from scratch.

Why Customers Abandon Checkout

Baymard Institute’s large-scale research puts these unexpected extra costs as the biggest cause for abandoning checkout:

• Shipping charges;
• Taxes;
• Fees that only appear at the final step.

Forced account creation is the next major culprit, with roughly a quarter of shoppers abandoning specifically because they were required to register before they could pay. 

A checkout process with too many form fields, or one that asks for information that doesn’t feel necessary for the purchase, produces the same effect. Shoppers disengage the moment the process starts to feel like more effort than it’s worth. 

Limited payment methods matter too. Research suggests around a fifth of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because their preferred payment method wasn’t available. This is a striking number given how easy this is to fix compared with, say, redesigning an entire checkout flow.

Slow website performance and pages that crash or time out account for a further meaningful share of lost sales. This problem is only getting more pronounced as more shopping shifts to mobile, where patience for a slow-loading page is even thinner than on desktop. 

Beyond the purely mechanical issues, a lack of trust in a site’s security and unclear delivery or returns information round out the list. Shoppers frequently abandon a purchase not because anything technically went wrong, but because the site simply didn’t reassure them enough to feel confident handing over their payment details.

Ways to Improve Checkout Flow and Reduce Friction

The good news is that as a business, you can overcome these challenges by implementing five core things into your strategy.

Use a Simple Single-Page Checkout

In most cases, less really is more, and that principle applies directly to checkout design. 

Studies show that companies thatswitch to a one-page checkout can experience a 257% increase in cart completion rate. 

Splitting checkout across several separate pages gives shoppers more opportunities to hesitate, get distracted, or simply lose momentum between steps. A single, well-organised checkout page keeps the process feeling short and manageable. 

The goal isn’t to cram less information onto the page. It’s to remove anything that isn’t essential and present what remains as clearly and concisely as possible.

Completing a purchase should feel like a handful of quick actions rather than a lengthy form-filling exercise.

Make Forms Faster and Easier to Complete

Every extra field a shopper has to fill in is a small additional chance for them to reconsider or lose patience. 

Autofill removes a genuinely tedious part of the process, and pairing it with an address lookup tool cuts form-filling time down considerably. 

Beyond automation, it’s worth auditing your checkout form field by field and asking honestly whether each one is actually necessary to complete the order; anything that isn’t should go. 

And when something does go wrong, specific error messages, shown immediately next to the field in question, prevent a shopper from abandoning out of simple confusion about what needs fixing.

Offer Guest Checkout

Research suggests that guest checkout can increase conversions by 10-45%. It remains extremely common for online shops to require an account before a customer can complete a purchase, and it remains one of the most reliable ways to lose that customer at the final step. 

Guest checkout removes this barrier entirely. A shopper can move straight from basket to payment without creating a password, verifying an email address, or committing to marketing preferences they haven’t thought about yet. 

The account creation itself doesn’t need to disappear. Offering it as an optional step after the purchase captures the benefit of a saved account for repeat customers. At the same time, you’re not risking the sale of a first-time or time-pressed shopper who simply wants to check out and move on.

Optimise Checkout for Mobile Shoppers

Mobile shopping isn’t a growing trend anymore. It’s the majority of ecommerce traffic, and mobile checkouts are abandoned considerably more often than desktop ones.

Mobile shoppers abandon their carts at a rate of85.65%. 

A genuinely mobile-friendly checkout needs more than a responsive layout that simply shrinks the desktop version down to fit a smaller screen:

• Products need to be displayed in a way that’s easy to browse with a thumb.
• Prices and categories need to be clearly sorted rather than crammed together.
• Any copy that does appear should be short, direct, and easy to scan at a glance rather than read in full.
• Use large, clearly labelled buttons – a shopper trying to tap a tiny “confirm payment” button on a moving train is far more likely to give up than one clicking confidently with a mouse. 

None of this works, though, if the page itself is slow. Fast loading times are consistently one of the biggest differentiators between mobile shops that convert well and those that don’t.

Ways to Build Trust Before Payment

At the same time, it’s essential to build trust before the shopper reaches the payment stage.

Here’s what you can do to achieve this.

Show Shipping Costs Early

Given that unexpected extra costs are the single largest cause of checkout abandonment, showing shipping costs as early as possible in the shopping journey removes the single biggest source of last-minute hesitation. 

Ideally, these costs should be added on the product page itself, or at the very latest, in the basket rather than at the final payment step.

A shopper who knows the full cost of their order before they start entering payment details is far less likely to abandon out of frustration at a number they didn’t expect to see.

Highlight Free Shipping and Free Returns

If your shop offers free shipping or free returns, say so clearly, and say it more than once. You can do this on the product page, in the basket, and again at checkout. 

High shipping costs, unclear delivery timelines, or a returns policy a customer has to hunt for are all genuine barriers to completing a purchase. Prominently addressing them removes a real source of purchase anxiety rather than just a cosmetic concern. 

A customer who’s confident they can return an item easily if it isn’t right is considerably more willing to commit to buying it in the first place.

Display Security and Trust Signals

Shoppers hand over sensitive payment information at checkout, and it’s entirely reasonable for them to want reassurance before they do. 

Clear, simple messaging around secure checkout, recognisable payment security badges, and visible contact information all signal that a business takes its customers’ security seriously. 

Customer reviews do similar work from a different angle. Social proof reassures a hesitant shopper that other people have bought from this site before, received what they ordered, and were happy with the outcome. 

None of these trust signals need to dominate the page, but their quiet, consistent presence throughout the checkout meaningfully reduces the hesitation that leads to abandonment.

Ways to Improve Payment Experience at Chechout

When it comes to the payment itself, it’s key that you provide a quick, easy, and safe journey for shoppers.

Offer Multiple Payment Options

When it comes to the final step, your customers need to know you’ve thought about how they want to pay, not just how you’d prefer to be paid. 

Offering card payments, digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and other alternatives covers the overwhelming majority of UK shopper preferences. 

Research shows that payment choice has a direct, measurable effect on conversion. Shoppers who don’t see their preferred method are considerably more likely to abandon rather than switch to something else. 

Make the Final Payment Step Clear

The last screen a shopper sees before paying needs to remove any remaining doubt about what they’re agreeing to.

All of the following things help a hesitant shopper commit to that last click: 

• A clear order summary;
• The final total, inclusive of any tax and delivery costs, not added as a surprise afterthought; 
• An unambiguous call-to-action button – one that clearly says “Pay now” or “Complete order” rather than something vague. 

Surprise fees at this exact stage are particularly damaging. A shopper who has come this far and then sees a new charge appear is abandoning at the point of maximum sunk cost and maximum frustration.

Use Payment Integrations That Reduce Friction

Behind that final screen, the technology processing the payment matters just as much as its design. 

Shopping cart integrations that connect your payment provider directly to platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or a custom-built store remove the need for a shopper to be redirected somewhere unfamiliar partway through paying. 

Pay buttons and hosted payment pages offer a similarly fast, secure route to completing a purchase. Most importantly, without the shopper needing to leave your site’s look and feel behind at the exact moment they’re deciding whether to trust you with their card details. 

The aim throughout is seamless online payment acceptance – a checkout that feels like one continuous, secure process from basket to confirmation, rather than a series of separate systems bolted together.

How to Recover Abandoned Carts

But what if you do have a high abandoned cart rate? 

Here’s what you can do to recover some of these sales.

Use Cart Recovery Emails

Not every abandoned cart is lost for good. Studies show that recovery emails outperform standard campaigns with 44.76% open rates.

A well-timed reminder email can bring back a meaningful share of shoppers who fully intended to buy but got distracted, lost signal, or simply ran out of time before finishing. 

Including a direct link back to their saved cart, rather than just to the homepage, removes the friction of having to rebuild the order from scratch. 

Timing matters here. A reminder sent within the first few hours tends to perform best, since the purchase is still fresh in the shopper’s mind. Messaging that stays polite and helpful keeps the email feeling like a courtesy rather than a nag.

Use Retargeting Ads

Beyond email, retargeting customers who’ve abandoned their cart with Pay Per Click (PPC) ads keeps your products visible as they browse elsewhere online. Studies suggest a substantial share of retargeted shoppers do eventually return to complete a purchase. 

Even where an ad doesn’t lead to an immediate sale, repeated, tasteful reminders of a product a shopper was genuinely interested in building brand recall. When they are ready to buy, your shop will be the one they think of first.

Offer Incentives Carefully

A small discount code or a free-shipping reminder can be an effective way to tip a hesitant shopper over the line, particularly for a first-time customer. 

It’s worth using this tactic carefully, though. Offering a discount automatically every single time a cart is abandoned risks quietly training regular customers to abandon their basket deliberately, in the expectation that a voucher will follow. 

Reserving incentives for genuinely hesitant, high-value, or new customers keeps the tactic effective rather than turning it into an expected part of your pricing.

How To Track and Test Checkout Performance

Improving checkout conversions isn’t a one-off project. It’s an ongoing process of measuring what’s actually happening and adjusting accordingly. 

Your checkout conversion rate and overall cart abandonment rate give you the headline picture. The real insight usually comes from digging one level deeper – identifying exactly where in the checkout shoppers are dropping off. 

Form drop-off points often point directly at a fixable problem, whether that’s a confusing address field or a step that feels unnecessary. 

Payment failure rate is another number worth watching closely. A high rate of declined or failed payments can indicate a technical issue with your payment provider rather than genuine shopper hesitation.

From there, A/B testing individual checkout changes lets you confirm whether a change is genuinely improving conversion, rather than assuming it will be based on general best practice alone. Small, measured tests, run one at a time, tend to produce far more reliable improvements than a wholesale checkout redesign based on guesswork.

How Online Shops Can Increase Checkout Conversions With Better Payments

Much of what determines whether a checkout converts well comes down to the payment experience itself. This is where the right technology partner makes a genuine difference. 

More payment methods mean fewer shoppers abandoning simply because their preferred option wasn’t available. On top of that, a faster checkout keeps momentum through to completion. 

Underneath all of this, secure payment processing and easy e-commerce integrations determine how smoothly all these pieces fit together for both the shopper and the business running the shop. 

myPOS offers PayButtons and shopping cart integrations with a simple set-up process and is easy for customers to use, alongside support for card payments and digital wallets. 

These features give UK online shops a wide, convenient payment offering without needing to manage several separate providers. Clear payment reporting on top of that makes it easier to spot exactly where in the payment journey conversions are being lost, feeding directly back into the kind of ongoing optimisation described above.

Conclusion

Checkout conversion ultimately comes down to the small number of consistent principles that we looked at above.

From simplifying your checkout page and offering guest checkout, to retargeting abandoned carts and widening your payment options, each of these changes chips away at the roughly 70% of shoppers who currently leave before completing a purchase.

For a UK online shop, recovering even a modest share of that lost revenue can make a meaningful difference to the bottom line.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I use exit-intent pop-ups effectively without annoying visitors?

Trigger them only once per session, keep the offer genuinely relevant (a discount or free shipping reminder rather than a generic pop-up), and make them easy to dismiss so they don’t feel like a barrier to leaving.

What A/B testing strategies yield the biggest conversion gains for small sites?

Focus on one change at a time – checkout page length, CTA wording, or guest checkout visibility tend to produce the clearest, fastest results for smaller stores with lower traffic volumes.

Can I recover abandoned carts with personalised email sequences?

Yes, a short sequence (an initial reminder within hours, a follow-up a day or two later, potentially with an incentive) generally recovers more sales than a single generic email.

What payment gateways offer the best conversion rates for UK shoppers?

Providers supporting card payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal together tend to convert best, since they cover the payment preferences of the widest range of UK shoppers. myPOS’s shopping cart integrations support this same broad mix.

How do I optimise product descriptions for SEO and conversion?

Write clear, benefit-led copy with the details shoppers actually search for, paired with high-quality product images. Vague descriptions and poor product image quality are both quiet but consistent conversion killers.

Is mobile-first design crucial for checkout success?

Yes, designing the mobile experience first, rather than adapting a desktop layout afterwards, is one of the highest-impact changes a shop can make.