Shop Pay Killing Afterpay Sales

[JoeTlow]

Ever since the Shop Pay system rolled out their payment plan, we have had a massive dropoff in usage of Afterpay. Turns out the reason is: when people enter their email (the first field to fill in checkout), if they have shopped on a Shopify hosted site previously, their payment info gets pulled in automatically...while circumventing the checkout area where the 'pay using afterpay" option is...it is not coincidence that we have had an over 66% drop in Afterpay use year over year every month since this started. Ive contacted Shopify support. The rep literally admitted that THEY wouldn't complete a sale if they ran into that on a site LOL. Our overall conversion rate has also dropped by apprx 25% each month as well. Has anyone else experienced this? Id think so considering this is a platform - wide issue; essentially Shopify has become financialized, and is now in the business of alternate payment plans...one would think that such tactics aren't even legal. This could be a class action against Shopify.  If anyone else has noticed this Id love to hear about it, and also any potential fixes. Thank 🙂

[Shay]

Hi @JoeTlow 

I sincerely appreciate your feedback here and your concerns. Hopefully I can address some of them for you. Shop Pay is an accelerated checkout option that customers can use to save their information for a faster checkout. This accelerated checkout option is comparable to other accelerated checkouts like Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat Pay, etc. If a customer chooses to use any of these accelerated checkout options then this fast tracks them through the checkout experience. 

Accelerated checkouts are optional. You can enable and disable them through your payment gateway settings at any time. This includes Shop Pay. If you feel that Shop Pay (or other accelerated checkouts) are not serving your customers based on the products you sell, then I recommend to test disabling these options to see if conversion increases or decreases. 

You can learn more about using Shop Pay and accelerated checkouts here: Activate Shop Pay · Shopify Help Center.

Another consideration is the use of Shop Pay Installments. I wasn't entirely sure from your initial post if you are using Shop Pay Installments on your store, or if you were just referring to the Shop Pay checkout flow. If you are not, this may be worth looking into as an alternative to AfterPay. 

EDITED September 8, 2023: Update - changing the text in the theme editor for "Checkout as guest" will only work when using third party express checkout options. This will not work to change the Shop Pay experience. 

Click to expand...

Shop Pay is considered a highly converting checkout experience and offers a lot of benefits to your customers. If you wish to keep it, but ensure customers know they have other options like AfterPay for checkout it might be worth changing the "Checkout as Guest" text to something that directs them to Afterpay instead, like: "Looking for AfterPay? Click here to check out as a guest instead". You can alter this text by going to Online Store > Themes > Click the three dots next to the published theme > Edit Default Theme Content. In the content editor search for "Checkout as guest" to replace the text with a more direct prompt. 

Good to note: We are shortly rolling out single page checkout for all merchants in the near future, which may eliminate this workflow concern for customers. You can view a sample of this here: Shopify Checkout.

If you have additional questions or concerns about this topic, please let me know. 

[Nomadica]

Shay,

We've been running into this issue as well, and it's causing some other problems. As you said the idea is accelerated checkouts should be a benefit - and they could be, but they are tooooo accelerated. The other problem with them is almost EVERYONE who uses it expects there to be one more step, there is no ability to change the shipping address or even see what the shipping is going to cost, and half the people who purchase don't even realize they've made a purchase util they get an email confirmation and ask us to eitehr cancle the order or modify it as it made the purchase when they were just trying to see what the total cos would be. So yes, we could turn off shop pay, but I think it's fundamentally a problem how it functions, and I'd like to have it as an option for expedience but only when functioning as most customers would expect. We have had a number of complaints about it and many customers assume it's us and our website that is the problem. In any case it's implementation is frustrating customers and affecting sales.

[Shay]

Hi @Nomadica 

Thank you for your feedback on this topic! I would love to hear more about how you would like to see the customer flow change. Right now, when choosing to checkout using Shop Pay, customer's should see an experience like this:

The shipping address and payment method are filled in automatically based on the customer's saved information. They can expand these sections though to change these if they so wish. They can also go back to the classic checkout view under the payment options to see alternate methods of payment as well.

The shipping method and rates shown will always show the lowest priced option first (same as classic checkout), but they can also expand that section to review other available shipping methods. 

The full cost of the order is broken down on the right hand side for customers to review and then they can complete the checkout once the information on the page is confirmed. 

The experience is the same on mobile, except that the order breakdown on the right hand side of the desktop view is moved to underneath the customer details in the flow.

Based on yours and your customer's feedback, how would you like to see this flow change? 

[Nomadica]

This is not the behavior or experience we are seeing. It is not showing any shipping charges or options, it just says continue to payment and then it instantly checked them out. I've seen this demonstrated in person on a mobile device, and had multiple customers complain about it. I'm testing it right now on my phone but it's not doing it. So I don't know how to replicate it unfortunately.

[Shay]

Thanks for following up with me about this. 

It sounds like what you are experiencing is actually a bit different then just having an accelerated payment gateway enabled.

The experience you are detailing sounds like you may have some products in your store set to "No shipping required", which would then bypass all the entire shipping stage of the checkout.

You can quickly check for this in your admin by going to Products > Select All Products > Bulk Edit. Make sure to add the column "Requires Shipping", all physical products should have a checkmark in that column.

[Nomadica]

It definitely is an item that requires shipping - it creates and order, charges them shipping, and sends them a confirmations. Sometimes the customers contact us suprised that an order was even placed, they were just trying to see what the shipping would be, sometimes they want us to cancel as the shipping ended up being crazy expensive but they didn't get to see it until after they got an email confirmation. And we are online only and sell physical products so we would notice if an order came through for an item that didn't require shipping because it's basically not possible.

[WCRS2]

What is the update on the new shopify checkout.  I had no idea until yesterday that this was so difficult.  Thankfully the customer reached out and brought it to my attention.  This seems like a long time issue waiting on a resoluation for us to give our customers payment options without losing money in the process.  Unfortunately Shop Pay Installments do not approve everyone so blocking additional payment options seem wrong.

[Eliterideaccs]

We have been loosing a lot of sales due to the Shopify shop app our customers do not get to see the option to pay with klarna 😒

[Winter2]

As a customer it’s impossible to use any other afterpay program if Shopify has your data. You just can’t do it. I abandon carts all the time. So in thatShopify is great as it saves so much money in not spending unnecessary dollars. Probably the things I consider I don’t actually need to buy. So yes you are right. Shop blocks all others on our end and encourages us to not spend that money. It’s good to save instead of spending. I doubt that’s their intent, they probably want to cannibalize afterpay etc. but it does save the CONSUMER a lot of money by limiting us and so we don’t buy. I was curious if there was a waY around it, as there are some things I would like but as it doesn’t seem possible, that’s okay too. Shoppay is a necessary stop function that limits spending. So that’s great! 

[Shay]

Hi @Winter2 

You always have the choice to checkout using your preferred method and if you don't wish to use Shop Pay, that is entirely okay. 

If Shop Pay accelerated checkout initiates and you wish to checkout a different way, you can use the "Checkout as guest" option on the checkout page. This will return you to the classic checkout experience with all payment options. 

If you wish to opt out of Shop Pay you can also do that any time. Please follow this link to see the instructions on how to do that: Shop Pay - Opt Out. 

[Diddy]

The issue that we see isn't that Shop Pay is an option, it's that customer's haven't selected an express payment option, instead the just enter their email address and Shopify automatically sends them in to Shop Pay made if Shopify recognizes the email.  As a result, the customer, who thinks their moving in our standard flow is actually diverted into the Shop Pay flow which only offers Shopify Payment options.  If we could keep Shop Pay as an option, but turn off the auto pilot where Shop Pay automatically redirects customers into the flow without customer awareness, that would be great.  Is there a way to configure this without turning off Shop Pay?

[menageriecosmet]

I was wondering why all of a sudden my sales plummeted when I toggled on Shop Pay! Shop Pay pushing customers into its own flow is confusing so many new customers that visit our store. I turned both Shop Pay & Installments off for now. The time it "saves" for some customers is not worth losing thousands of dollars a day on new ones. 😞

[Nomadica]

Ahhh ... I think we're getting at the problem - is it possible to be a "guest" in Shop Pay, and still logged into your customer account on the Shopify store? Regardless it's clearly confusing a lot of customers and even store owners, and it wouldn't really matter to any of us if it meant MORE sales, but it's converting less sales, and Shopify should be concerned about that.

[WCRS2]

No you are either logged into Shop Pay or you are logged in as a guest or with your regular customer account on Shopify.  If you are logged into Shop Pay the only options they see is Shop Pay Installments and credit cards.  All other payment plans are blocked.  It is definitely confusing.  I think I los t a $200 order this week because of it.  And while we understand it as business owners it isn't always easy for our customers to navigate and they don't always reach out with the issue.  Yes they should be concerned.  I would like to know the update of the checkout update to fix this.  Otherwise I am probably going to stop using Shop Pay for now until this is resolved.  I know most people don't get approved with Shop Pay