What is Shop Pay? A guide for Shopify store owners

Rebecca Anderson

What is Shop Pay? A guide for Shopify store owners

As a Shopify store owner, understanding and optimizing your payment methods is essential for customer satisfaction and business growth. Among Shopify's payment solutions, Shop Pay stands out as a fast, secure, and convenient checkout option for customers.

Shop Pay is an accelerated checkout service developed by Shopify that streamlines the purchasing process for customers by securely storing their email addresses, credit card details, and shipping and billing information. This enables swift, one-tap checkouts on any Shopify store that supports Shop Pay, enhancing the overall shopping experience.

This guide will explore what Shop Pay is, how it works, and how you can integrate it seamlessly into your Shopify store.

What is Shop Pay?

Shop Pay is an accelerated checkout service offered by Shopify, designed to streamline the buying process for both customers and store owners. By securely storing customers’ email addresses, credit card details, and shipping and billing information, Shop Pay enables one-tap checkouts across any Shopify store that supports it. This simplicity reduces cart abandonment rates and makes the checkout process faster and more convenient.

Key features of Shop Pay:

Faster Checkouts: Save customer details for seamless, one-tap purchases.
Installment Payments: Offer flexible payment plans through Shop Pay Installments powered by Affirm.
Secure Transactions: Encrypts customer information to ensure data safety.
Eco-Friendly Option: Funds tree planting for every order processed.

Shop Pay: How does it work?

Shop Pay saves customer information during their first purchase on a Shopify store. When they return to the same store—or any other store using Shop Pay—their details are automatically filled in, drastically reducing checkout time.

When customers return to make another purchase, either on the same store or a different one using Shop Pay, their information is automatically filled in, significantly reducing the time spent on checkout. This feature is particularly helpful for mobile shoppers, who often find entering extensive details on small screens cumbersome.

Steps to activate Shop Pay:

Log in to your Shopify admin and navigate to Settings > Payments.
Under the Shopify Payments section, click on Manage.
Locate the Shop Pay section and ensure that the checkbox for Shop Pay is selected.
Finally, click on Save to save your changes.

Once Shop Pay is added to your store, customers will be able to use it as a checkout option. Here's how they will experience Shop Pay:

First-time users are prompted to save their information during checkout.
Verification is quick and secure with a six-digit code sent via email or text.
Returning customers enjoy one-tap purchases without re-entering details.
Customers can update their Shop Pay info and opt-out at any time.
A wide range of languages are supported including: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Want to make the most of Shop Pay? Design beautiful, high-performing Shopify pages with Instant, perfectly integrated to streamline the checkout process and improve customer experience.

Comparison: Shop Pay vs. Shopify Payments

Although both are integral parts of the Shopify platform, Shop Pay and Shopify Payments serve distinct purposes:

Shopify Payments: Handles payment processing and supports multiple payment options.
Shop Pay: Speeds up the checkout process by saving and auto-filling customer details.

Shopify Payments is the primary payment processor for Shopify, handling the acceptance and processing of payments. In contrast, Shop Pay focuses on expediting the checkout process. The key difference lies in their roles: Shopify Payments facilitates payment processing, whereas Shop Pay enhances the customer checkout experience.

Shopify Payments offers a streamlined payment process by integrating with multiple payment providers. This ensures that customers have a variety of payment options at checkout, which can significantly increase conversions and revenue for merchants.

In comparison, Shop Pay aims to improve the overall customer experience by simplifying and speeding up the checkout process. It reduces the number of steps required for customers to complete their purchases, resulting in a higher conversion rate and increased customer satisfaction. Additionally, Shop Pay is only available for merchants selling in United States dollars (USD).

Another significant difference is that Shopify Payments charges transaction fees, while Shop Pay does not. With Shop Pay, merchants only pay the standard credit card processing fees set by their payment provider.

Shop Pay Installments

Shop Pay also offers buy now, pay later (BNPL) options through Shop Pay Installments. This feature allows customers to split payments into four interest-free installments or monthly plans, increasing affordability and improving conversion rates for merchants.

Eligibility: Provided by Affirm and available to customers in the U.S.
Reminder System: Customers receive email or SMS notifications before each payment.
Impact on Sales: Flexible payments encourage higher-value purchases.

Benefits of Shop Pay for Shopify merchants

When evaluating Shop Pay, several benefits and features stand out:

Higher Conversion Rates: Simplified checkouts reduce friction, leading to more completed sales.
Increased Average Order Value (AOV): BNPL options make higher-priced items more accessible.
Eco-Friendly Shopping: Attract environmentally conscious customers with carbon offsetting.
Enhanced Security: Build trust with robust encryption and PCI compliance.
Improved Customer Loyalty: A seamless experience encourages repeat purchases.

The Shop App: A companion to Shop Pay

The Shop App works alongside Shop Pay to offer additional features like order tracking and personalized shopping recommendations. So, while Shop Pay streamlines the checkout process by enabling fast, one-tap purchases, the Shop App extends this convenience by offering a comprehensive shopping assistant.

With this app, customers can:

Track orders in real-time.
Discover new products from their favorite stores.
Manage purchases across multiple Shopify stores.

If you’re curious about how the Shop app works alongside Shop Pay to enhance the overall shopping experience, this video clip explains everything you need to know about the Shop app, including its role in tracking orders and providing a streamlined checkout process:

Shop Pay pros and cons

While Shop Pay can boost conversions by speeding up the checkout process, it’s important to understand how to use it best for maximum impact.

In this video, Rebecca Worsley from Rainy City Agency audits a Shopify brand’s PDP, sharing her insights on when using Shop Pay might be ideal and when it could cause missed opportunities to increase your Average Order Value (AOV):

Here are additional pros and cons of using Shop Pay for your online store:

Pros:

Saves time with faster checkouts.
Encourages larger purchases with flexible payment options.
Secure, encrypted storage of customer data.
Eco-friendly initiative for sustainable shopping.

Cons:

Limited to Shopify stores.
Some customers may hesitate to save personal details, despite encryption.
Currently available in select countries (but that's likely to change!).

The benefits of Shop Pay make it an attractive option for merchants looking to improve their customer experience and boost sales. With its growing popularity and positive feedback from customers and store owners, it is worth considering as a payment option for your business.

How to maximize Shop Pay with Instant

For Shopify store owners, Shop Pay represents a significant advancement in enhancing the ecommerce experience, offering speed, convenience, and security that benefit both customers and store performance. By adopting Shop Pay, you’re not just providing a faster payment solution; you’re streamlining the entire checkout process to improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

To maximize the potential of Shop Pay, pair it with high-converting landing pages and product sections designed using Instant. With Instant's no-code page builder, you can create custom Shopify pages that integrate seamlessly with Shop Pay, providing a cohesive and optimized shopping experience for your customers.

Start building today and see how the combination of Shop Pay and Instant can take your Shopify store to the next level.