One Page Checkout: What It Is and How to Use It

In the world of ecommerce, the checkout experience is a pivotal moment. It's the final step that transforms a browser into a buyer. At Shopify, we are committed to making it as seamless and intuitive as possible. We’ve already built the best-converting checkout on the internet, outpacing the competition by an average of 15%. Now, we’ve made it even better—Shopify's new redesigned checkout is shorter, faster, more intuitive, and all on one-page. 

What is one-page checkout?

One-page checkout is Shopify’s fully redesigned out-of-the-box checkout. We’ve evolved the current three-page steps to a much more streamlined experience that’s optimized for speed and conversion, providing your buyers with the best shopping experience on the internet.

What makes this new design better?

Our new design goes beyond a mere aesthetic upgrade; it's a thoughtful reimagination that’s intuitive and easy to use. We've fine-tuned every pixel and interaction, ensuring each element of the design serves a purpose in guiding your buyers towards completing their purchase. This meticulous attention to detail results in a checkout experience that looks good, is delightful for buyers, and highly converting.

Shorter and faster checkout for your buyers 

The redesigned checkout streamlines everything into a single page, creating a smooth and friction-free shopping experience. With fewer page loads and a shorter shipping rate load time, buyers can complete their purchases faster. We've also automated the credit card name filling and simplified the billing address selection, further speeding up the process.

Intuitive and optimized for conversion

The one-page experience is intuitive and designed to drive higher conversion by reducing friction and enhancing the user experience. We have taken inspiration from our highest converting checkout, Shop Pay, and brought the Guest Checkout experience to have the same accelerated feel. For example, pre-filled sections for known buyers are now auto-collapsed, accelerating them through checkout. We've also refined every design detail to offer the most enjoyable shopping experience, ensuring that buyers can focus on the most important elements.

Built on the ever improving checkout platform

The one-page checkout is built on top of an always-improving checkout platform that’s low-latency, reliable, compliant, and can handle up to a hundred thousand checkouts per minute. We leverage our scale advantage to constantly innovate, ensuring our platform is secure, performant, and conversion-optimized. Since early 2022, we have shipped several improvements to our new checkout, adding up to 1.5% of the conversion lift. 

Fully customizable and seamless integrated with checkout extensibility

Designed with extensibility at its core, plus merchants can easily preview and switch to the new design within the checkout editor. The one-page checkout will integrate seamlessly with your existing extensibility powered apps and customizations, providing a smooth, cohesive switch. It's upgrade-safe and is the checkout canvas for any new features or updates from Shopify. This flexibility means that your checkout customizations now seamlessly work across three-page, one-page, and Shop Pay with no additional work or maintenance on your part.

Why does a one-page checkout matter?

Having powered over half a trillion dollars in commerce, we've observed a shift towards identity-driven experiences in the checkout landscape. Our one-page checkout is designed to bring the overall checkout experience as close as possible to the seamless identity-driven checkouts offered by the likes of Shop Pay. By reducing the steps required to complete a purchase, we’re also able to minimize friction and maximize conversion.

The future of identity-driven shopping extends beyond wallets. Our new checkout experience will be able to recognize buyer information on pre-checkout touchpoints like storefronts or social media, and handle these partially known buyer cases by pre-filling in details, auto-collapsing and accelerating buyers wherever applicable. With Shopify, you define the future of commerce. 

How did we build the best one-page checkout?

We get it, there are different opinions online about one-page versus multi-page checkout. The three most frequently mentioned concerns are: the potential for long-scrolling pages, difficulties with analysis, and slow page loading speeds. We've taken them all into account and addressed each one in our new design.

Streamlined design, no long-scrolling

One of the common perceptions about one-page checkout is that it could result in an infinite scrolling page, potentially overwhelming buyers with too much information at once. We've tackled this issue head-on with our design. We automatically roll up filled content into a summarizing title, allowing buyers to focus on filling out the next section without being distracted by previous inputs. The result is a clean, easy-to-navigate page that enhances the buyer's experience.

Comprehensive tracking and analysis 

We understand the importance of funnel data and site analysis in ecommerce. Rest assured, our one-page design doesn't compromise on this aspect. You get the same reliable data with your existing tracking setup, making funnel data and site analysis as straightforward as ever. This means you can continue to gain valuable insights into your customers' behavior and optimize your strategies accordingly.

Faster than before page loading speed

There's a misconception that a one-page design, with more content, will take longer to load. However, we've built our one-page checkout on our ever-evolving checkout platform that's optimized for speed. In fact, we've observed an average of 4 seconds faster buyer checkout completion time across our buyers, which adds up very quickly across millions of checkouts a day. This means a smoother, quicker shopping experience for your customers and potentially higher conversion rates for you.

How to get started today

If you are on the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plan, your checkout will default to the new one-page design. You may change back to the three-page layout from your Online Store Editor, in the Checkout section of Theme settings. 

For Plus merchants, if you’ve upgraded to checkout extensibility, you will see the new one-page layout in your checkout editor. Simply: 

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
2. In the Checkout customization section, Create a draft checkout, or Customize an existing one.
3. Once you’re in your checkout editor, click on the Settings icon in the far left column. Scroll down, and you will see the layout switcher at the bottom left corner. 
4. You can easily preview the one-page design and switch between the two layouts here. All your customizations and extensions will integrate seamlessly.

If you are still on checkout.liquid, consider upgrading to Checkout Extensibility today to gain access to the one-page design. Head over to settings > checkout and click on “Create draft” to get started. For more information on Checkout Extensibility, check out the hub. 

Our one-page checkout isn't just a concept—it's a proven tool that's already helping merchants improve their conversions. Read more about how Stella Eats and Hemlock & Oak have leveraged the power of one-page checkout to enhance their customers' shopping experience and boost their sales. The new design is also applicable to both D2C business and B2B businesses. 

Shopify Checkout offers merchants the best conversion, the most globally-recognized buyer experience, proven reliability and performance of our infrastructure, and flexibility to customize to their unique business. Try it out for yourself.