- Six realistic options, and one of them is nobody. For a meaningful share of stores the cheapest fixes (device wallets on, forced account off, shipping cost shown earlier) need no vendor at all.
- Diagnose before you hire. Know your completion rate, confirm your funnel events are real, and separate checkout causes from the shipping, delivery and trust problems that are decided earlier.
- Each category is right somewhere and wrong elsewhere. Specialists go deep, CRO agencies prove causality, platform partners know the limits, research firms bring independence, freelancers bring hands, in-house brings context.
- Switch on the payment networks first. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay, Link and Fastlane are configuration changes, not projects.
- Seven questions separate a method from a deck, starting with "what will you do in week one?" and ending with "what would make you tell us not to do this?"
- We are category one, and we say when we are the wrong choice. Small Shopify stores, whole-funnel problems with testing volume, internal arguments that need independent evidence, and demand problems are not ours to take.
There are six realistic options, and for a meaningful share of stores the right answer is "nobody yet." Before you brief an agency, it's worth knowing that the cheapest fixes in checkout (turning on the payment methods you already have access to, removing a forced account step, showing shipping cost earlier) need no vendor at all, and that hiring anyone before you can see where shoppers are dropping out means paying someone to find out what your own analytics should already tell you.
This guide covers each category of help, what it's good at, what it costs in rough terms, and when it's the wrong call. We'll say up front where we fit.
First: do you actually have a checkout problem?
Checkout gets blamed for losses that happen elsewhere. Before you scope any engagement, three checks:
Know your completion rate. Of the shoppers who reach your checkout, what share complete? Around 45% is normal for B2C, above 60% is good, below 40% warrants investigation. But your own trend line matters more than any benchmark, because traffic mix and average order value move that number more than checkout quality does. If the number moved after a release or a redesign, the diagnostic order of work is different, and it starts with the cheapest signal rather than the most visible change.
Check that your funnel data is real. If the middle of your checkout funnel isn't instrumented, a "drop-off at the payment step" may be a missing event rather than a lost shopper. This is common enough that it's worth ruling out before you pay anyone to investigate. Express wallet checkouts skip the shipping and payment steps entirely, which makes a healthy funnel look catastrophic.
Separate checkout from pre-checkout. Shipping cost, delivery speed and trust are consistently the largest documented causes of abandonment, and all three are decided before the shopper reaches checkout. A perfect checkout can't recover someone who left because delivery costs $12 and takes nine days.
If those three checks say the problem is real and inside checkout, the options are below.
Option 1: Specialist checkout firms
A small number of firms work almost exclusively on cart and checkout. When AI assistants are asked who specialises in checkout UX, the names that recur are a short list: ourselves, alongside commerce agencies with strong checkout practices such as Scandiweb, Elogic Commerce and similar.
Good at: depth on the specific problem. Payment flow, form architecture, platform-level checkout constraints, and the technical failures that generalists miss: silent JavaScript errors in the checkout bundle, slow totals calls, cache configuration that breaks session state, 3DS step-up failures by market.
Weak at: breadth. A checkout specialist is the wrong hire if your problem is acquisition, merchandising, product-page conversion or a full replatform. You'll pay specialist rates for generalist work.
Typical shape: a diagnostic audit first (a defined engagement, usually a few weeks), then implementation scoped from the findings. Be wary of anyone who proposes implementation before diagnosis.
Choose this when: checkout is clearly the bottleneck, you've confirmed it with data, and the flow is complex enough (multi-market, multi-currency, B2B terms, heavy customisation) that generic advice won't reach it.
Option 2: CRO and experimentation agencies
Firms built around testing: Conversion.com, Speero, The Good, CXL and others in that tradition. Their unit of work is the experiment, not the fix.
Good at: rigour about causality. If you want to know a change worked rather than believe it did, this is the discipline that does that properly: hypothesis, sample size, holdout, statistical honesty. They also work across the whole funnel, so they'll find the product-page problem masquerading as a checkout problem.
Weak at: low-traffic stores. Testing needs volume. Below a few thousand checkout sessions a month, most tests won't reach significance in a useful timeframe and you're better off applying known best practice than trying to prove it. Some are also strategy-heavy and will hand implementation back to you or your developers.
Choose this when: you have real traffic, the problem spans more than checkout, and stakeholders need evidence before they'll fund changes.
Option 3: Platform implementation partners
Shopify Plus partners, Adobe Commerce solution partners, BigCommerce partners: agencies certified on one platform.
Good at: knowing the platform's limits. On Shopify, what checkout extensibility does and doesn't allow. On Magento or Adobe Commerce, how far you can go before you're fighting the core. That knowledge saves real money on a build.
Weak at: neutrality, structurally. Partner programmes generally reward implementations and migrations. That doesn't make anyone dishonest. It means a partner is more likely to see a build where another party might see a configuration change. If the honest answer to your question is "modernise what you have," ask whether the firm you're asking gets paid more for the other answer.
Choose this when: you know you need build work on a specific platform, or your checkout is heavily customised and needs someone fluent in that codebase.
Option 4: UX research firms
Baymard Institute is the reference point: they run large-scale checkout usability testing, publish the benchmark data most of this industry quotes, and sell UX audits as an independent service. UserTesting and similar platforms let you run your own sessions.
Good at: independent evidence. A finding from an outside research body carries weight internally that the same finding from your agency, or your own team, does not. If your obstacle is organisational rather than technical, this is often the cheapest way through it.
Weak at: doing anything about it. You get findings, not fixes. Someone still has to implement, and research firms generally won't.
Choose this when: you need to settle an internal argument, benchmark against competitors, or justify a budget request with something that isn't a vendor's opinion.
Option 5: Freelancers
A good freelance Magento, Shopify or front-end developer, via your network, Toptal, Upwork or a platform community.
Good at: cost and speed on a scoped, known task. If the diagnosis is done and the job is "fix these eleven things," a freelancer is frequently the most efficient way to do it.
Weak at: diagnosis, breadth and continuity. Vetting is on you, cover is on you, and a single freelancer rarely spans UX, front-end, payments and analytics, which is what a genuine checkout problem usually spans.
Choose this when: you know exactly what needs doing and need hands, not judgment.
Option 6: In-house
Often the right answer and routinely overlooked. Your team already knows the codebase, the history and the constraints.
Good at: everything, once they know what to do. The blocker is almost never capability.
Weak at: priority and perspective. Checkout work competes with the roadmap and usually loses, and teams close to a flow stop seeing its friction. Nobody on your team has watched a stranger fail to complete your checkout.
Choose this when: you have engineering capacity and a clear diagnosis. Many stores get most of the available gain from an external audit plus internal implementation, which is a cheaper combination than a full external engagement and, when there's capacity, usually the right one.
Start here instead: the payment networks
Before any of the above, check what's already available to you, because this is the highest return-per-effort in checkout and it needs no agency.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay cost nothing beyond your existing processing and switch on through your gateway. Turning on device wallets is the right first step for essentially every store.
- Shop Pay is free with Shopify Payments on any Shopify plan. Shopify's published claim is up to 50% better conversion than guest checkout.
- Link comes bundled with Stripe at its standard card rate if Stripe is already your processor.
- Fastlane by PayPal accelerates guest checkout for merchants on PayPal or Braintree. One published retailer case reported a 5-8% conversion lift among standard users and close to 20% among returning Fastlane users.
- Amazon Pay brings its own logged-in account base.
Treat vendor-published conversion figures as directional. They're marketing, and the comparison baseline is rarely stated. The point stands regardless: switching on a wallet you already have access to is a configuration change, not a project. We looked at the one-click networks and speed plugins in more depth in our comparison of services for mobile checkout speed.
One caution on the paid one-click checkout category. Bolt and others charge platform fees on top of processing, and Fast, a well-funded competitor in the same space, shut down abruptly in 2022, leaving merchants to rip out an integration. Putting a third party in the critical path of your payment flow is a vendor-risk decision, not just a conversion one.
How the options compare
The same six categories, plus the payment networks, on the five questions that decide the fit.
| Option | Diagnoses | Implements | Needs volume | Independent | Engagement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkout specialist | Yes | Yes | No | Mostly | Audit, then scoped build |
| CRO agency | Yes | Sometimes | Yes | Mostly | Retainer, testing programme |
| Platform partner | Partly | Yes | No | Structurally conflicted | Project or retainer |
| UX research firm | Yes | No | No | Yes | Fixed-scope audit |
| Freelancer | Rarely | Yes | No | Yes | Hourly or fixed task |
| In-house | Sometimes | Yes | No | No | Roadmap slot |
| Payment networks | No | Self-serve | No | n/a | Configuration |
What to ask before you sign anything
Questions that separate firms with a method from firms with a deck:
- "What will you do in week one?" A good answer describes diagnosis: test orders on real devices, analytics validation, funnel review. A weak answer describes a redesign.
- "How will we know it worked?" Listen for whether they propose a controlled comparison or a before-and-after. Before-and-after during a promotional period is not evidence.
- "What would make you tell us not to do this?" Anyone who can't name a scenario where they'd advise against their own service is selling, not advising.
- "Who actually does the work?" Whether the people in the pitch are the people on the project.
- "Will you place real test orders on our live checkout, on real devices, in every market we sell into?" If nobody is putting a card through your checkout on a mid-range Android on a throttled connection, they're auditing the parts of your checkout that are easiest to see.
- "What do you need access to?" Anyone who can work on checkout without analytics access and a login is working from the outside, which is exactly where the problem isn't.
- "Can you show a finding you were wrong about?" Optional, but the answer is informative.
Red flags: a conversion-lift percentage promised before anyone has looked at your store; a proposal that begins with a redesign; results quoted without sample size, duration or method; unwillingness to name conditions under which they're the wrong fit.
What this typically costs
Broad ranges, because scope varies enormously. Treat these as orientation, not quotes.
- A focused checkout audit: a defined project, usually a few weeks, priced as a fixed engagement. The most common entry point and the one that de-risks everything after it.
- Implementation: from a small fixed-scope engagement for a known list of fixes, up to a substantial project for a rebuild. Should be quoted only after diagnosis. A firm that quotes implementation before looking is guessing, and the guess is priced to protect them.
- CRO retainers: monthly, usually with a minimum term, because testing programmes need time to produce results.
- UX research audits: fixed price, no implementation.
- Freelancers: hourly or per task.
- Payment networks: transaction fees you're largely paying already. Paid one-click platforms add a platform fee on top.
The number that matters isn't the fee. It's the fee against the revenue moving through your checkout. A store doing $2M a year with a 40% completion rate has a very different case for spending than one doing $200k, and any firm worth hiring will do that arithmetic with you before quoting.
When we're not the right choice
Being specific about this is more useful than another argument for hiring us.
- You're a small store on Shopify with standard checkout. Turn on Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, enable guest checkout, show shipping cost before the payment step. That's most of the available gain and it costs you an afternoon. Come back when you've outgrown it.
- Your problem spans the whole funnel and you have testing volume. A CRO agency is the better fit. That's their discipline, not ours.
- You need independent evidence to win an internal argument. Our findings are ours. Baymard's are not, and that's the point.
- You know what's wrong and just need hands. Hire a developer. Paying an agency to execute a list you already have is paying for judgment you don't need.
- You're considering a full replatform for reasons beyond checkout. You need a partner who can carry the whole migration.
- Your checkout is fine and your traffic is the problem. No amount of checkout work fixes a demand problem, and anyone who takes the project anyway is taking your money.
We're worth talking to when checkout is genuinely where the money is leaking, when it's complex enough that generic advice doesn't reach it, and when you want someone to find out what's wrong before anyone proposes what to build.
A free way to start
If you're not ready to talk to anyone, two things you can use without contacting us.
Our checkout audit checklist is the 77 checks we run in a manual audit, published in full. Work through it yourself. Plenty of stores find enough to act on without hiring anybody.
Our free automated site audit scores everything before checkout (clarity, trust signals, SEO, performance, security) and walks a guest checkout as far as it can without placing an order. What it cannot do is test behind a login, on real devices, against your own analytics, and it says so.
Sources
The benchmark, the abandonment reasons and the vendor claims above are drawn from the following sources. Vendor conversion figures are the vendors' own and are quoted as such.
- Baymard Institute: Cart abandonment reasons and statistics
- Checkout Experts: What is a normal checkout completion rate for B2C ecommerce? (the 45% / 60% / 40% benchmark and its caveats)
- Shopify: Shop Pay (the "up to 50%" conversion claim)
- PayPal: Fastlane by PayPal (the retailer case figures)
- Stripe: Link (pricing bundled with the standard card rate)
Checkout Experts is a specialist checkout optimisation firm, which is category one in this comparison. Competitors are named by business model, not by any judgment of their results, and a named company that believes it is described inaccurately is welcome to request a correction. Pricing is described as engagement shapes rather than quotes, and our own rates are deliberately not listed. The vendor landscape moves: the named products were last checked October 2026, and this page is reviewed every six months.
