Checkout
The checkout is the final section of an online purchase: the steps from the shopping cart to the confirmed order. Because many customers abandon their purchase here, it is considered a particularly important and technically demanding part of a shop in online retail.
Checkout is the English word for the payment process at the register. On the internet, it refers to the steps that lie between “I want to buy this” and “order has been placed.” You enter a delivery address, choose a shipping method, decide on a payment method, and confirm at the end. Only with this confirmation does a legally valid purchase contract come into existence. Before that, the goods merely sit in the shopping cart, which is a non-binding wish list within the shop. The checkout is thus the digital equivalent of standing in line at the supermarket checkout.
Why shops fight for every click at checkout
The checkout is the point where a shop actually makes money. Everything before it only costs money: advertising, product photos, server operation. If something goes wrong here, all that effort was in vain.
And it goes wrong very often. Industry surveys show that around two-thirds of all filled shopping carts never lead to an order. This figure is called the abandonment rate. Typical reasons are surprisingly high shipping costs, a forced registration requirement, or a missing preferred payment method.
That’s why the checkout is a popular field for small experiments. A shop shows one half of visitors variant A, the other half variant B, and compares the sales. Removing a single input field can measurably increase revenue. This explains why payment service providers achieve billion-dollar valuations with the promise of “one click less.”
The stages between shopping cart and confirmation
Technically, a checkout consists of several steps that build on one another. First, the shop calculates the final price: item prices, taxes, shipping, discounts. Then it checks whether the item is even still in stock. After that, address and payment details are recorded.
The shop does not process the payment itself. It hands it off to a payment service provider, i.e., a company like PayPal, Klarna, or Stripe, which collects the money. This company requests authorization from the bank or credit card company. Once it comes back, the amount is considered reserved.
Only after that does the shop write the order into its database and send a confirmation email. It’s important that every step is protected against duplicate execution. If someone double-clicks “Pay,” they shouldn’t be charged twice. Cases exactly like this are what make a checkout more complex than it appears from the outside.
From online shop to the register in the store
The term is most commonly encountered in online shops, often directly as button text “Go to checkout.” Paying with your phone via Apple Pay or Google Pay is also a checkout, just a very short one. The address and card are already stored there, leaving only a confirmation via fingerprint.
In business news, the term usually appears together with figures. Companies report on their conversion rate, i.e., the share of visitors who actually make a purchase. If it rises by one percentage point, that can mean millions for large retailers. New regulations, such as mandatory two-factor confirmation for card payments, also affect exactly this point.
A common misconception is equating checkout with shopping cart. The shopping cart only collects items, the checkout completes the purchase. And in brick-and-mortar retail, checkout refers to the actual register, as in terms like “self-checkout” for self-service checkouts in the supermarket.
