BigCommerce Checkout Optimization: A Practical Playbook

Ecommerce founder testing checkout on phone

The fastest way to lift BigCommerce checkout conversion is to work in a fixed order. First find the step where shoppers leave. Then configure the native checkout settings. Customize only where the data justifies it, and measure every change against revenue per session, not just completion rate. Most stores skip the first step and the last one, which is why their checkout changes feel like guesses. We build and tune commerce platforms for scaling teams, and this is the sequence we would hand a head of ecommerce on day one.

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TL;DR

  • Instrument the funnel first. GA4 events for begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase show which step loses the most shoppers.
  • Four causes explain most abandonment: surprise costs, forced account creation, a long or slow flow, and missing payment methods.
  • Start with native settings (guest checkout, address autocomplete, billing matching shipping, wallets) before any custom code.
  • A fully custom checkout moves PCI-DSS responsibility and update maintenance onto your team, so reserve it for needs the managed checkout cannot meet.
  • Judge each change by checkout conversion, payment failure rate, load time and revenue per session together.

Table of Contents

Why BigCommerce checkouts leak revenue

Cart abandonment is the baseline problem. Baymard Institute puts the average at roughly 70% across ecommerce, and a large part of that lost revenue comes from friction you control. Not every abandoned cart is recoverable, since some shoppers were only browsing. The recoverable part sits among shoppers who had real purchase intent and met an obstacle.

Baymard’s research on shoppers with purchase intent shows what the obstacles are. In the 2025 figures reported by BigCommerce, 48% of those shoppers left because extra costs such as shipping, taxes and fees were too high. Account creation, a long or complicated flow, and distrust of the site with card details follow. Separately, Baymard reports that 17% of US online shoppers abandoned an order in the past quarter because checkout was too long or complicated, and that the average US checkout shows 23.48 form elements by default against an ideal of as few as 12.

That last gap is the one most BigCommerce teams can close quickly. The causes group neatly into four buckets, and each maps to a specific lever:

Cause of abandonment What it looks like in your funnel First lever to pull
Unexpected cost Drop between cart and shipping or payment step Show shipping and tax estimates earlier, state free-shipping thresholds in the cart
Forced account creation Drop at the first checkout screen Make guest checkout the most prominent option
Long or complicated flow Drop spread across steps, high time on page Cut fields, default billing to shipping, add address autocomplete
Payment friction Drop or errors at the payment step, worse on mobile Add wallets, fix error messaging, review decline reasons

Step 1: Find where shoppers actually leave

Do not redesign anything until you know which step loses people. A change aimed at the wrong step costs engineering time and moves nothing.

Turn on funnel tracking

BigCommerce’s native GA4 integration, found under Settings > Analytics > Google Analytics, sends the ecommerce event set including begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase. With those events flowing, you can build a funnel exploration in GA4 and read the percentage remaining at each stage.

Then add what the funnel cannot tell you: why. A drop at the payment step might come from a shipping cost revealed too late, a promo field that throws an error, a payment option that fails silently in one browser, or a layout that buries the place order button on mobile. Filtering session replays to shoppers who reached that step and left is how you separate those causes.

Segment before you conclude

A blended checkout conversion rate hides the real story. Split the funnel by:

  • Device. Dynamic Yield’s benchmark network showed an 81.72% mobile cart abandonment rate in April 2026, with mobile bringing roughly three quarters of visitors. A flat desktop funnel and a leaking mobile funnel average out to something that looks merely mediocre.
  • Payment method. Wallet users and card users fail in different places.
  • New versus returning shoppers. Returning shoppers feel account friction less.
  • Geography. International shoppers meet currency and local payment gaps that domestic ones do not.

The output of this step is one sentence: “We lose the most shoppers at X, on Y device, probably because of Z.” Everything after it serves that sentence.

Step 2: Configure the native checkout first

BigCommerce’s default checkout, Optimized One-Page Checkout, already handles a lot. Per BigCommerce’s documentation, it is responsive and minimal, defaults the shipping country from the shopper’s IP address, lets you preselect shipping methods, detects card type automatically and shows the shopper’s selected currency. The settings in Settings > Checkout let you go further.

The settings worth reviewing today

  1. Guest checkout. Allow it, and make it unmistakable. Baymard’s 2025 benchmark found 62% of sites fail to make guest checkout the most prominent option, while 19% of shoppers abandon rather than create an account. A button labeled “Continue as Guest” is clearer than a small link under a login form.
  2. Default billing to match shipping. Most orders ship to the billing address, so one fewer block of fields is one fewer reason to leave.
  3. Address autocomplete. Google Address Autocomplete is available for select countries and cuts typing, which matters most on a phone.
  4. Default shipping option. Preselecting a sensible method keeps the shopper moving and shows a real delivery cost sooner.
  5. Coupon and gift certificate field. You can show the field or hide it behind a link. A prominent empty promo box sends some shoppers off to search for codes, so the link version is worth considering if you run few promotions.

The same documentation lists all of these as built-in options, so none requires a developer.

Try the enhanced checkout experience

BigCommerce’s enhanced checkout experience removes the separate billing step by placing billing address fields below the selected payment method. It is an opt-in upgrade under Settings > Checkout and can be reverted at any time. It keeps most of the existing page structure and CSS class names, but BigCommerce recommends testing your customizations first because some may need updates, and some checkout apps may not yet support it. Review every installed checkout app before you switch.

Step 3: Fix the cost surprise

Because unexpected cost is the largest single driver, it deserves its own pass. The checkout cannot make shipping cheaper, but it can stop it from being a surprise.

  • Put a shipping estimate or free-shipping threshold on the product and cart pages.
  • Show tax behavior clearly for your market. US shoppers often see tax only at the final step, so a note in the cart on how it is calculated sets expectations.
  • Make the order total visible throughout checkout, not only on the last screen.
  • Show return information near the purchase decision. Baymard’s 2025 data, as summarized by Shopify, shows 15% of shoppers abandon over an unsatisfactory return policy, and 43% of sites do not show return information on the product page.

These are content and template changes, and they often outperform design work on the checkout itself.

Step 4: Make mobile and payments easy

Mobile checkout is where field count, keyboards and payment choice collide. BigCommerce’s own guidance, written with a payments partner, recommends real-time payment error messages, card-number spacing, billing defaulting to shipping, browser autofill, address autocomplete and saved payment information. For mobile it adds responsive forms, numeric keypads and mobile wallets.

Key features that simplify mobile checkout

Payment coverage is a conversion lever in its own right. Stripe’s payment methods guide states that up to 16% of shoppers abandon their cart if their preferred payment option is not available. BigCommerce checkout supports 65+ payment providers, 250+ payment methods and out-of-the-box wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, so the capability is usually there and the gap is in configuration.

Speed matters too. The same payments study found that 19% of North American shoppers would abandon a transaction if checkout took more than a minute. A minute is long, but a form with 11 fields typed on a phone gets close.

Field audit: what to cut

Baymard’s benchmark of top-grossing stores, reported by BigCommerce, found the average flow has 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields, and that 22% of users abandoned a flow because of its complexity. Run a simple audit:

  • List every field a new shopper sees.
  • Mark each as required to ship, required to charge, or required by your own systems.
  • Remove or defer the third group. A second address line, a company name for consumer orders and a phone number you never call are common candidates.

If marketing or sales operations need that data, collect it after purchase on the confirmation page or by email, not before payment.

Selling across borders

If you ship outside the US, local payment preferences become a conversion factor. BigCommerce’s localization documentation notes that Stencil multi-language support covers only the strings in the theme, not database content such as product names, and recommends setting alternate-language strings for key parts of the storefront, catalog and checkout. Currency display, translated checkout labels and the regional payment methods shoppers expect should be reviewed together rather than one at a time.

Step 5: Customize only when the data demands it

The pull toward custom checkout is strong, especially for enterprise teams with brand and compliance requirements. The trade-offs are concrete, so decide with them in view.

BigCommerce documents several routes: restyle the Optimized One-Page Checkout, or build a custom checkout using Open Checkout, the Checkout JS SDK, the GraphQL or REST Storefront APIs, or the REST Management API. Open Checkout gives a functional foundation. The JS SDK supports a checkout built from scratch but cannot create new shipping or payment methods. The REST Management API handles checkout outside a storefront session for headless channels such as native apps, but does not support store credit or gift certificates as payment methods.

Route Best for What you take on
Native settings Nearly every store as a first move Almost nothing; updates arrive automatically
Checkout Extensions (Beta) Adding to a step while staying on the managed checkout Beta status; BigCommerce keeps PCI responsibility and updates
Restyled one-page checkout Brand-consistent look Testing after BigCommerce releases
Custom checkout Requirements the managed flow cannot meet, headless builds Ongoing maintenance and compliance responsibility

The compliance point deserves emphasis. BigCommerce states that a custom checkout may affect PCI-DSS compliance, that some checkout scripts can make the store fully responsible for it, and that custom checkouts no longer receive automatic feature, bug fix and security updates. PCI-DSS is the card industry’s security standard for handling payment data. BigCommerce recommends the default checkout for anyone not comfortable assuming that risk. The rule we use: if a requirement can be met by a setting, an extension or CSS, do not write a custom checkout.

Step 6: Test and measure like a revenue team

Checkout changes are easy to ship and hard to judge. A rise in completion rate can hide a rise in payment declines, or a slower page.

Measurement guidance for ecommerce teams suggests tracking checkout conversion rate, abandonment by step, payment decline rate by reason and method, average order value and revenue per session. It also calls for consistent events covering cart viewed, checkout started, each step completed, payment attempted, and payment succeeded or failed.

A workable testing routine:

  1. Write the hypothesis from the funnel. “Mobile shoppers drop at shipping because the total jumps.” Not “let’s try a new layout.”
  2. Rank ideas by impact and effort. Native settings and copy changes come first, custom development last.
  3. Set guardrails before launch. Watch error and exception rates, checkout load time and time to interactive, and payment failure and retry rates.
  4. Run one change at a time on the affected segment. Mixed changes make results unreadable.
  5. Judge on revenue per session over a full business cycle, so weekday and weekend behavior both appear.

Traffic is the constraint for most stores here. If volume is modest, prefer changes backed by strong research, such as guest checkout and field reduction, and compare before and after periods carefully rather than chasing small A/B differences.

What we have learned building commerce platforms

Checkout rarely fails because of one thing. It fails at the seams: the shipping rule that lives in one system, the tax display that lives in a theme, the payment method configured by someone who left, the analytics event that stopped firing after a release.

That is why we treat checkout as a connected system rather than a page. Strategy, theme work, integrations and reporting have to move together, and the people who decide the roadmap should be the same people who ship the changes and read the results. When they are, a finding like “mobile shoppers drop at shipping” becomes a fix within a sprint instead of a ticket that waits in a queue between an agency, a developer and an analytics contractor.

For scaling brands on BigCommerce, our approach is to start with the funnel data, exhaust native settings, and reserve custom code for what the business truly needs. That keeps your checkout upgradable and your team focused on revenue instead of maintenance.

Service

When a dedicated team makes sense

The steps above are manageable for a store with an in-house developer and an analyst. They become heavy when checkout touches several systems: a multi-storefront setup, ERP-driven shipping rules, B2B pricing, CRM sync and attribution, or a headless front end. In those cases the slow part is coordination, not the checkout itself.

Quick To Impress embeds senior strategists with client teams and delivers planning and execution in one accountable partnership, with the people shaping the roadmap staying involved in the build. Engagements are structured as monthly capacity: Core capacity runs $3,500 to $5,999 per month, Growth capacity $6,000 to $9,999 per month, and Scale capacity starts from $10,000 per month. See the pricing page for what each tier covers, or read about our growth platforms work and our approach for enterprise commerce teams.

Quicktoimpress

To see how we handle related pieces of the commerce stack, our posts on the BigCommerce Page Builder widget limit and BigCommerce B2B Edition fit go deeper on adjacent decisions. If you run speed work alongside checkout, our image optimization guide covers a common source of slow pages.

FAQ

What is the quickest BigCommerce checkout improvement?

Make guest checkout the most prominent option and default billing to match shipping. Both are native settings that need no code. They address account creation and form length, two of the leading reasons shoppers leave, and you can set them in Settings > Checkout.

Is BigCommerce’s one-page checkout good enough, or do I need a custom one?

For most stores the Optimized One-Page Checkout is the right base. It is responsive, supports guest checkout and early shipping calculation, and keeps receiving updates. Move to a custom checkout only for requirements the managed flow cannot meet, such as a headless channel, since custom builds carry PCI-DSS and maintenance responsibility.

How do I find out where shoppers abandon my BigCommerce checkout?

Connect GA4 under Settings > Analytics > Google Analytics so begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info and purchase events are recorded. Build a funnel exploration to see the share remaining at each step, and segment it by device and payment method. Session replays then show the cause behind the drop.

How many fields should a checkout have?

Fewer than most stores show. Baymard reports the average US checkout displays 23.48 form elements by default, while an ideal one needs as few as 12. Remove anything not required to ship or charge, and collect extras after purchase.

How do I know a checkout change worked?

Compare checkout conversion, payment failure rate, load time and revenue per session before and after, on the segment you targeted. A higher completion rate alone is not enough if declines or load time worsened.

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