Industry Research · Ecommerce & AI Commerce

The checkout page is becoming optional. The commerce stack behind it isn’t.

By Albert Richer, Founder & Lead Editor Updated August 17, 2026 / 7 min read

For years, the checkout advice was the same: cut the form fields, add a progress bar, and abandonment will fall. The forms got shorter. Abandonment didn’t move. It has sat near 70% for more than a decade, which is a strong hint the real problem was never the number of fields.

Two forces are finally shifting it, and neither is a shorter form. The first is that identity and payment credentials, not layout, increasingly decide whether a checkout converts. The second is stranger: a fast-growing share of shoppers now arrive through AI, and new agentic-commerce protocols are starting to let them buy without ever opening your checkout page.

The 70% abandonment number hides two different problems

Baymard has tracked cart abandonment for over a decade, and it barely moves. The mistake is treating all of it as sales you could win back.

The Baymard Institute puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, a meta-analysis of more than 50 studies that has held near that level for years.Baymard That figure gets quoted as if 70% of your revenue is walking out the door. It isn’t. Baymard’s own survey work finds that about 43% of shoppers abandon simply because they were browsing or not ready to buy, behavior no checkout change was ever going to capture.Baymard

Strip those out and what remains is genuinely fixable, and it is mostly about cost and effort, not button placement.

Source: Baymard Institute. “Just browsing” is a single main reason; the rest are multi-select among shoppers who abandoned for a reason other than browsing, so they don’t sum to 100%.

Baymard estimates a typical large ecommerce site could lift conversion by roughly 35% through checkout improvements alone, once you aim at the fixable half instead of the browsing half.Baymard

The biggest gains have moved below the checkout page

The highest-leverage improvements aren’t visual anymore. They live in identity and payment credentials, underneath the form.

Start with identity. Shopify says its Shop Pay wallet can convert up to 50% higher than guest checkout, and that simply offering Shop Pay drove about a 5% lower-funnel lift even for shoppers who didn’t use it. Those are vendor-published figures from a Big Three consulting study Shopify commissioned in 2023, so treat them as Shopify’s numbers, not a law of nature.Shopify The more useful part for buyers: Shopify now offers Shop Pay on other commerce platforms, so a store can bolt on a better checkout component without replatforming everything.Shopify That is composability in a form you can actually picture.

Then the payment credential itself. Visa reports that Click to Pay’s tokenized card-not-present transactions carry a 4.3% average authorization-rate lift versus raw card numbers, because the network pre-validates the token before it reaches your bank.Visa At scale that compounds: Visa says its first 10 billion tokens generated more than $40 billion in incremental ecommerce revenue globally and saved about $650 million in fraud in a single year. Those are Visa’s own measurements, but they’re a different class of evidence than a checkout-tips blog.Visa

That matches what I keep seeing when we test these tools for our checkout-platform rankings: the ones that pull ahead aren’t fixing the checkout page, they’re fixing what happens behind it. Airwallex is the one that stuck with me. I pushed a test order through from overseas, and it just charged the buyer in their own money and paid me out in mine, no plugin, no doing exchange-rate math in my head. It takes something like 160 local ways to pay, so most shoppers see an option they already trust. They never notice any of it, and that’s the whole point.

Your next customer may never open your storefront

This is the part that dates the whole conversation to 2026. A fast-growing share of shoppers arrive through AI, and the rails for agents to buy on their own now exist.

Adobe, which tracks more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, found that AI-referred traffic grew 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026. The bigger surprise is quality. In March 2025 that AI traffic converted 38% worse than everyone else. By March 2026 it converted 42% better, with revenue per visit running 37% above non-AI traffic. That is a full reversal in a single year.Adobe Adobe also found the obvious catch: it scored the average retail homepage at 75% machine-readable but product pages at just 66%, meaning roughly a third of a typical product page can’t be read cleanly by the very agents now sending their best traffic.Adobe

The rails are being built fast, and by the biggest names. Google introduced a Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart to let agents work across discovery and purchase.Google OpenAI shipped an Agentic Commerce Protocol so an agent can complete a purchase while the merchant stays merchant-of-record on its existing payment stack.OpenAI And Visa built a Trusted Agent Protocol so a merchant can tell an authorized shopping agent apart from a malicious bot.Visa

Here is where the old “should my checkout be headless?” debate finally pays off. An agent clicking through a human registration form is brittle; it works far more reliably against a checkout it can call programmatically. That is the same modular architecture vendors have pitched for years, except the reason has changed: not shipping features faster, but staying sellable through interfaces that don’t look like your storefront. The MACH Alliance’s enterprise research, from an association that advocates composable architecture, reports that organizations further along in composable adoption are far more likely to say they can deploy AI successfully.MACH Alliance

It is worth remembering how we got here. Back in 2020, Gartner predicted that companies adopting a composable approach would outpace competitors by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation by 2023. No published follow-up ever measured it, and vendors have recycled the line since.Gartner The prediction came true in a way nobody framed at the time: the competitor you can’t keep up with may not be another retailer at all, but an agent that transacts through APIs you either expose or you don’t.

You can see the same tradeoff in the platforms themselves. WooCommerce runs something like 38.7% of all online stores, and people love it because you own everything: your checkout, your customer list, the code itself. That’s also the kind of open, plug-into-anything setup an AI agent can actually work with. But our checkout-platform research is blunt about the flip side, and so am I. I ran a store on it for a while, and the freedom was real, but so was the night I realized that if my checkout sprang a security hole, nobody but me was going to patch it.