How to supercharge conversion: Optimize your checkout

Conversion is key to business success across the board, from growing the business to building customer loyalty. It may be the right time to brainstorm ideas for accelerating sales and revenue — and it could all come down to improving your checkout conversion rate with the right tech stack.

Improve checkout conversion to drive growth

Improving conversion is an attainable goal, once you break it down into bite-size tasks and adopt the right tools. When you do improve conversion, you can accomplish more than simply increasing sales. You’ll also improve the return on investments you make in payment infrastructure. Here’s your guide to supercharging conversion.

Offer customers flexible payment choices

As a group, your customers likely have varied payment preferences — and even those preferences may change from time to time, depending on the type or size of the purchase. It’s important to the business’s checkout conversion rate and overall growth that customers see these choices when they’re ready to pay. In one study, more than 55% of consumers surveyed globally consider their preferred payment method so essential that without it, they won’t shop with a business.¹

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment options such as PayPal Pay Later have become a popular choice with consumers who value flexibility. EMARKETER has predicted that more than 93 million U.S. shoppers used BNPL services in 2024.²

Fight fraud with unified data — while improving checkout

Fraud prevention is essential for every online business, but when it slows down the checkout process, it can put a dent in sales. Slow or inefficient fraud detection tools can result in false charge declines or additional authentication requests for shoppers. Experts estimate that poor checkout flow and design causes online retailers to miss out on $260 billion in recoverable sales revenue each year.³

Reduce checkout friction and its impact on conversion by gathering insights from your business’s payment and fraud data. This can often mean choosing the same provider for fraud management and payment processing. Business owners can use unified fraud and payment data with machine learning to review hundreds of fraud signals instantaneously — allowing more checkout purchases to get approved faster.

Streamline guest checkout

Not every customer wants to create an account with your online store. Smooth the path to payment by offering a fast guest checkout that helps cut down on the steps it takes to complete a transaction. The convenience of accelerated checkout solutions like Fastlane by PayPal can help you avoid losing sales to sluggish checkout.

Shoppers using Fastlane have been shown to complete guest checkout about 28% faster.⁴ In addition, data from early adopters shows that returning Fastlane users convert at nearly 67%.⁵

Reach new audiences

The more payment choices you offer, the wider your reach can be with new audiences. For example, Millennial and Gen Z shoppers, who make up around 42% of US consumers,⁶ prefer convenient digital options for payments, like splitting a bill and sharing about what they buy on social media.

Offering Venmo can help your business reach active shoppers. Pay with Venmo users have a conversion rate of 73%,⁷ and love sharing news about purchases on the Venmo social feed. You can even join the conversation and reply with a thank-you post from your business.