The Shopify Checkout Optimisation Playbook: How Aussie DTC Founders Fix the Leaks That Cost Them Sales at the Final Step

You spend thousands getting a shopper to the checkout. The ad, the email, the product page, the reviews, all of it exists to move someone to that final screen with their card in hand. Then, at the exact moment they are ready to pay, a huge share of them walk. Roughly 72% of online carts are abandoned, and a big slice of that happens inside the checkout itself, not before it.

Here is what makes this the most frustrating leak in your whole funnel: it is also the most fixable. A shopper who reaches your checkout has already decided they want the product. They are not a cold visitor who needs convincing. They are a warm buyer being tripped up by friction you put in their way. Forced sign-ups, too many form fields, a slow mobile page, a surprise cost at the last second.

The gap between an average Shopify store and a great one is stark. The average Shopify conversion rate sits around 1.4%, while the top 20% of stores clear 3.2% or higher. A chunk of that difference is not the product or the ad. It is the checkout. This playbook walks through the specific leaks that cost Aussie DTC founders sales at the final step, and exactly how to seal them.

Start by Measuring Your Real Checkout Completion Rate

Most founders track conversion rate as a single number and stop there. That hides the problem. You need to know your checkout completion rate: of the people who reach the checkout, what percentage actually finish. Shopify shows this in the conversion funnel inside Analytics, broken into reached checkout, added payment, and completed purchase.

Stores with a clean checkout and express payment options typically land in the 40% to 55% completion range. If yours is well below that, the issue is not your traffic or your offer. It is the checkout experience itself. The funnel view tells you where people drop: if they reach checkout but never add payment, your form is the problem. If they add payment and still bail, it is usually a surprise cost or a trust wobble.

Get this number in front of you before you change anything. You cannot fix a leak you have not measured, and you cannot prove a fix worked without a baseline. Write down today’s checkout completion rate and the drop-off at each step. That is your scoreboard for everything below.

Leak 1: Forced Account Creation

The single most expensive friction point in ecommerce is making people create an account before they can buy. Around 24% of shoppers abandon when a store forces registration at checkout. They came to buy a product, not to remember another password.

Guest checkout should be the default, no exceptions. Let people buy with just an email and shipping address, then invite them to create an account after the order is placed, when the friction costs you nothing. Shopify’s checkout supports this out of the box, and Shop Pay handles the “remember me” part far better than a forced login ever could.

If you are running a members-only or wholesale model where accounts genuinely matter, keep the account creation optional at checkout and push it into the post-purchase flow instead. The order comes first. The relationship comes second. Never make the customer earn the right to give you money.

Leak 2: Too Many Form Fields

Every field on your checkout is a small tax on completion. The average checkout asks for close to 15 fields. An optimised one uses as few as 7. Cutting or making optional the fields you do not truly need can lift conversion by up to 30%.

Go through your checkout field by field and challenge each one:

• Company name. Unless you sell B2B, make it optional or remove it.
• Second address line. Keep it, but never make it required.
• Phone number. Only require it if your courier genuinely needs it for delivery. Otherwise it reads as a spam risk to the shopper.
• Address autocomplete. Turn on address lookup so one tap fills the whole block instead of five separate fields.

Then use Shopify’s ability to enable full-name as a single field, autofill support, and smart defaults for country and currency based on the shopper’s location. The goal is a checkout a distracted person can finish one-handed on a train. Every field you remove is money you keep.

Leak 3: No Express Checkout

This is the highest-return fix on the list, and it takes minutes. Express checkout options let a returning or recognised shopper pay in a couple of taps without typing anything. The data on Shop Pay is hard to ignore: it lifts conversion by up to 50% versus guest checkout and converts up to four times faster on mobile. On mobile specifically, Shopify reports roughly 91% higher conversion through Shop Pay compared to standard checkout.

For an Australian store, the express wallet mix matters. Here is the setup to prioritise:

• Turn on Shop Pay. In Shopify Payments settings, enable Shop Pay. It is native, free, and the highest-converting option available.
• Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay. Same settings screen. These cover the one-tap wallet crowd on iPhone and Android.
• Add Afterpay. Buy now, pay later is huge with Aussie shoppers. Afterpay at checkout removes a real purchase barrier for higher-ticket carts.
• Surface the buttons early. Show express checkout buttons on the cart and product page, not just the final step, so the fast path is visible from the start.

Brands like The Oodie and Frank Body, both Aussie names running on Shopify, put Shop Pay and Afterpay front and centre for exactly this reason. The accelerated wallets do the heavy lifting so the customer never has to fill a form at all.

Leak 4: A Checkout That Fights the Phone

The majority of your traffic and orders are now mobile. In early 2025, around 68% of online orders were placed on smartphones. Yet mobile still converts worse than desktop, roughly 3.0% against 4.4%. That gap is not because phone shoppers are less keen. It is because most checkouts are still quietly built for a mouse.

Close the mobile gap with a few specifics:

• Right keyboards. The number pad should appear for phone and card fields, not the full QWERTY.
• Tap targets. Buttons and fields big enough to hit with a thumb, with room around them.
• Speed. A slow checkout on 4G loses people. Up to 18% of shoppers abandon simply because checkout felt slow or confusing. Trim the apps and scripts weighing your pages down. Our site speed playbook covers how.
• Sticky pay button. Keep the call to action visible so the shopper never has to hunt for it.

Test your own checkout on your actual phone, on mobile data, not office wifi. If it feels even slightly clumsy to you, it is losing you orders at scale.

Leak 5: Surprise Costs and Missing Trust

The number one reason people abandon at checkout is cost they did not see coming. Shipping, taxes, or a fee that appears only at the final step. The shopper feels ambushed, and they leave. The fix is not to hide the cost longer. It is to remove the surprise entirely.

Show shipping cost, or your free shipping threshold, well before checkout. A cart that says “You’re $14 from free shipping” turns a nasty surprise into a helpful nudge. If you have not set your threshold properly yet, our free shipping threshold playbook shows how to pick a number that protects margin.

Trust matters just as much on the final screen. A shopper handing over card details wants reassurance. Reinforce it with:

• Recognisable payment logos. Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Afterpay all signal legitimacy.
• A clear returns line. A short “30-day easy returns” note near the pay button lowers the risk the shopper feels.
• Security cues. The padlock, an SSL note, and no broken images or stray console errors that make the page feel unfinished.

Customise the Right Way with Checkout Extensibility

When you do change the checkout, do it through Shopify’s supported tools, not brittle hacks. Checkout Extensibility lets you add trust badges, upsells, custom fields, and delivery instructions through approved apps and the checkout editor, without editing checkout.liquid, which Shopify has retired for the modern checkout.

This keeps your checkout fast, secure, and upgrade-safe. It also means your customisations survive Shopify’s updates instead of breaking on the next release. If you are on Shopify Plus, you get even more control over branding and logic, but every store on the current checkout can use extensions to add what it needs without slowing the page down.

The discipline here is restraint. Every extension you add is weight. Add only what earns its place: a trust badge, a relevant one-click upsell, a delivery note field. Resist the urge to cram the checkout with widgets, because each one is a fraction of a second of load time and a fraction of a percent of conversion.

The Compound Effect: Why Checkout Fixes Pay Off Everywhere

Here is why the checkout is worth this much attention. Every other improvement you make to your store only helps the slice of traffic it touches. A better product page lifts the people who see that product. A checkout fix lifts every single order, from every channel, forever.

Lift your checkout completion rate from 45% to 52% and you have just grown revenue across all your traffic without spending another dollar on ads. That improved economics then feeds everything else: you can afford to bid more on Meta and Google, your payback period shrinks, and your profit per order holds up. The checkout is the multiplier that sits under the whole business.

It carries into retention too. A smooth first purchase sets the tone for the relationship. Pair a frictionless checkout with a strong post-purchase thank you page and the customer’s first experience of your brand is competence, not chaos. That is what earns the second order.

Your Checkout Audit Checklist

Run this on your own store this week. Open your checkout on your phone and work down the list:

1. Record your checkout completion rate. Pull the conversion funnel in Shopify Analytics and note the drop at each step.
2. Confirm guest checkout is on. No forced account creation before purchase.
3. Count your form fields. Aim for seven or fewer required. Make the rest optional or remove them.
4. Enable every express wallet. Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Afterpay, surfaced on cart and product pages.
5. Test on mobile data. Right keyboards, big tap targets, fast load, sticky pay button.
6. Remove the cost surprise. Show shipping and your free shipping threshold before checkout.
7. Add trust cues. Payment logos, a returns line, and clean security signals near the pay button.
8. Customise via Checkout Extensibility. Supported apps only, and only what earns its weight.

Work through those eight and re-check your completion rate in a fortnight. Small percentages at the checkout turn into big numbers at the bank, because they apply to every order you will ever take.

Inside eCommerce Circle, the checkout is one of the first places we look when a member wants more revenue without more ad spend, because the leaks are usually hiding in plain sight. If you want a fresh set of eyes on yours, let’s talk.