While we like to keep on top of the latest developments of key ecommerce platforms, we’ve yet to find a reason to move away from Shopify – which remains our best recommendation for advanced, streamlined, and fully customisable online retail.
A recent study now confirms what we have long believed: that Shopify Checkout is simply the best-converting checkout experience available. For this study, Shopify partnered with one of the “Big Three” strategy consulting firms. They handed over their data, and they were confident enough that they vowed to publish the results whatever they showed.
Predictably though (and certainly for anyone who has worked with them), Shopify came out as the best option for a modern ecommerce store.
The results of the study showed that Shopify’s conversion rate was on average 15% higher than its competitors – and in some cases, as much as 36% better.
Not only that but:
- Shopify’s fast checkout feature – Shop Pay – added further advantages, with this streamlined system scoring up to 50% higher conversion than guest checkout, and beating competitors’ fast checkouts by 10% or more.
- Lower funnel conversion on a store could see a 5% conversion increase due merely to the presence of the Shop Pay feature.
Shopify Checkout consistently performs at the top of the industry, but to understand why, we should take a look at some of the powerful features and attractive benefits this ecommerce giant provides.
Four Reasons to Migrate to Shopify Checkout
In the Shopify article that announced the results of the study, Shopify identified four factors that they believed were responsible for putting their product ahead of the curve:
- Identity network
- Scale
- Consumer trust
- Innovation
Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
Identity network
We are often advising our clients to move to integrated membership systems. A one-click checkout is a powerful thing – just ask Amazon – but it goes beyond that. When ecommerce is driven by unique identity profiles, it allows for all kinds of other features to come into play. Member discounts, intelligent product recommendations, subscription reminders, and more…
Why sell once to a guest, when you could be building a long-term and mutually-beneficial relationship with your customer.
Shopify offers one of the most advanced and customisable “digital wallet” systems out there. They tout their Shop Pay model as a tool for “removing friction and reducing the overall steps required at checkout.”
But at the core of this is their unmatched data and analytics system. With more than 100 million buyers on their books, already registered and primed for one-click checkout, this becomes an extraordinary resource to have at your disposal.
According to Shopify, their Shop Pay feature – which allows registered buyers to complete a purchase at four times the speed it takes a guest – in turn contributes to a 50% overall boost in conversion rates.
It’s simple, really: the easier you make it for customers to buy from you, the more likely they are to complete a purchase.
Additionally, when you factor in complementary tools, such as Shop Cash, Shop Pay Instalments, and the wide array of loyalty features that we can install into your online store, you start to see the real power of Shopify’s identity network.
Scale
Another good reason to be using Shopify – and one of the strengths that Shopify notes about its own platform – is scale. That is to say, Shopify has already been adopted by so many users, and it is familiar to so many consumers worldwide, that migrating your ecommerce store to Shopify is simply a no-brainer at this point.
To illustrate the point, Shopify cite the following figures:
- Roughly 10% of ecommerce in the US is now powered by Shopify.
- The platform is home to millions of brands, it’s visited by hundreds of millions of shoppers per year, and has processed more than half a trillion dollars of gross merchandise value.
- Shopify’s peak sales event (in 2022) saw $7.5 billion in purchases – which involved Shopify Checkout processing as much as $3.5 million per minute at the fastest times.
One of Shopify’s largest brands has had 40,000 buyers using the checkout at once, all without so much as an error message.
So in short – if you think your company is going to need more checkout power than that, then your only sensible option is to build the next Shopify yourself. For everyone else though, let’s talk about getting your store migrated to Shopify!
Consumer trust
To some degree, trust goes hand-in-hand with scale. Shopify is a household name at this point, and that familiarity consumers feel for the brand goes a long way towards reassuring their buying habits on the platform. Hundreds of millions of consumers a year can’t be wrong… right?
But it’s more than just name recognition. Shopify has been so influential in the ecommerce world, that its store layouts and core functionality have come to define the kind of online shopping experience that many consumers expect.
While the look and feel of a Shopify store can be customised to every client’s needs, the processes and the internal logic remain the same. And it’s this familiarity that contributes to overall trust.
According to Kyla Robinson, vice president of digital product at Spanx, consumers need to “trust our checkout as much as they trust our products – and recognise the path to purchase as easily as they recognise our brand.”
Innovation
We saved our own favourite point for last. As developers, and designers, one of the things we love most about working with Shopiffy is the incredible freedom the platform gives us to experiment, to customise, and to fully personalise your store to meet your needs.
It is frankly quite incredible that Shopify has managed to make such a powerful suite of tools so universally customisable. And all of this builds into a system that actively encourages innovation.
The one-click checkout process of Shopify’s Shop Pay can be fully integrated with all of its Checkout Extensibility features – which essentially means that this is the world’s only one-click checkout that is fully customisable.
We can create a store for you using Shopify’s out-of-the-box tools and plug-ins, and leave you with a system that’s incredibly easy to manage and even upgrade on your own, with no coding necessary. However, there is also full freedom here to build in bespoke apps and software solutions, and with a bit of clever development work, to create a store that is absolutely unique and yet still massively user-friendly.
Shopify Migration Services
So there we are, it’s more or less official now – for the vast majority of businesses, Shopify Checkout is the best ecommerce platform you could be using in 2023.
If you are currently looking to migrate your store to Shopify, then let’s talk. We have successfully guided many past clients through all manner of different Shopify upgrades – from Shopify Plus and Shopify 2.0 migrations, to the development of bespoke apps, the implementation of subscription and membership models, and of course, full customisation and branding to bring your online store in line with your business identity.
At Inspira, we live and breathe Shopify!
So for any and all of your Shopify migration needs, just drop us a line. We’ll be glad to chat with you, and find out how we can help.
