Express Checkout 2026: One-Click Payment in Your Shop

Checkout is the moment of truth in e-commerce – and at the same time the point with the largest leakage. The average cart abandonment rate is 70.22 percent (Baymard Institute, average across 50 individual studies). According to the same analysis, better checkout design can release a conversion increase of 35.26 percent. Express checkout methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and the European Wero system remove exactly those steps where people drop out. This guide shows how to introduce express checkout in Shopware 6 and WooCommerce – and which rules apply along the way.

Why every click in the checkout counts

Checkout is the only step in the buying journey that nobody visits for fun. Users arrive here because they want to buy – and still, seven out of ten abandon. A large share of that cannot be recovered at all: 42 percent of the online shoppers surveyed state they were just browsing and not ready to buy (Baymard Institute). The rest comes down to friction that can be removed – unexpected costs, too many fields, forced registration, detours via the bank.

• 70.22 percent average cart abandonment rate (Baymard Institute)
• 42 percent of abandonments come from pure browsing without purchase intent (Baymard Institute)
• 40 percent abandon because extra costs for shipping, tax and fees are too high (Baymard Institute)
• 18 percent leave because the shop requires a customer account (Baymard Institute)
• 17 percent cite a checkout that is too long or too complicated (Baymard Institute)
• 35.26 percent conversion increase is achievable through better checkout design (Baymard Institute)

How large the lever is depends on the installed base: 86 percent of people in Germany have bought online at least once, 70 percent within the last three months (Federal Statistical Office). Anyone losing seven out of ten carts in this market is not losing them to the market but to their own buying journey. This is exactly where express checkout comes in. In our conversion optimization work, wallet buttons on the product and cart page are regularly among the measures with the shortest path to effect.

70.22 percent abandonment – and what is behind it

The reasons for abandonment can be separated cleanly, and the largest single item is not the form but the price at the end: 40 percent of respondents abandon because shipping, tax or fees raise the total unexpectedly (Baymard Institute). Only then follow delivery that is too slow at 20 percent, distrust towards card payment at 19 percent, the required customer account at 18 percent and the overly long process at 17 percent. The last three points are purely questions of design – and that is precisely where express checkout starts.

The required customer account is the item that is cheapest to fix: a visible guest checkout costs no license and no rebuild of the data model. Anyone who wants to save carts therefore starts not with the layout but with the mandatory fields – and with the question of how quickly a wallet button can take over the entire process. What happens technically is described in the next section.

Express checkout: what it actually is

Express checkout means: the customer pays with a single confirmation, without filling in address, shipping or payment forms. The data already sits in the wallet of the operating system or the payment service provider – name, address, card, email. The shop receives it through an interface, the customer confirms biometrically. The standard for this is described by the W3C Payment Request API: it lets the browser act as an intermediary between the three parties in a transaction – the payee, the payer and the payment method. The interface is only exposed in a secure context, which in practice means exclusively over HTTPS (W3C).

A second point is often overlooked: express checkout is not only shorter but also less error-prone. Typing mistakes in the address or the card number disappear because nothing is typed. Confirmation on the device covers both elements required by the regulation – possession of the device and the biometric characteristic. Where that applies, the detour via a separate query at the bank is not needed.

Apple Pay, Google Pay and Wero compared

Not every wallet has the same impact, and the German market has its own ranking. Internet payment methods are the most used means of payment for purchases on the internet at 50 percent of payment transactions; direct debits and credit transfers follow at 30 percent and credit cards at 15 percent (Deutsche Bundesbank). Within the internet payment methods the distribution is even clearer: PayPal leads the market with around 86 percent, followed by Apple Pay at 7 percent in transaction terms (Deutsche Bundesbank).

By revenue the picture shifts. Direct debits and credit transfers account for the largest share of online retail revenue at 45 percent, while internet payment methods lose 7 percentage points (Deutsche Bundesbank). The debit card remains a minor role online: its use in online retail stands at 4 percent (Deutsche Bundesbank). For the selection this means: one wallet covers the bulk of transactions, direct debit and credit transfer cover the revenue.

These figures do not point to a single wallet but to a combination. Anyone offering only the credit card reaches 15 percent of payment transactions. Anyone offering a widely used internet payment method, the wallet of the respective operating system and one credit transfer route covers the breadth without overloading the checkout with buttons.

Wero and SEPA Instant: express, European style

Wero is the wallet of European banks based on instant credit transfers. The regulatory foundation has been fixed since 2024: Regulation (EU) 2024/886 obliges the payment service provider of the payee to make the amount available in the account within ten seconds of receiving the payment order. The implementation deadlines are binding as well: institutions in the euro area had to offer receiving by 9 January 2025 and sending by 9 October 2025 (Regulation (EU) 2024/886). For the shop this means: the money has arrived before the customer has finished reading the confirmation page.

Two further points make the route interesting for merchants. First, the payment is a credit transfer and therefore final – there is no chargeback procedure as with cards. Second, a surcharge for this route is not permitted: an agreement on a fee for the use of a SEPA credit transfer, a SEPA core direct debit, a SEPA business-to-business direct debit or a payment card is void (Section 270a of the German Civil Code). Anyone wanting to price the cheaper payment method may therefore not do so for these procedures. We set up such flows as part of our e-commerce programming.

Passkeys and biometrics: less friction without risk

Passwords are the silent brake in checkout. They are forgotten, reset, mistyped. Passkeys replace them with a key pair that stays in the device and is released biometrically. The standard for this has been a W3C Recommendation since 25 August 2026 (Web Authentication Level 3). Two properties are decisive for the shop: credentials are each bound to a given relying party, and other relying parties can detect neither their properties nor their existence (W3C). A login form rebuilt on a different address therefore gets to see nothing.

Reducing checkout fields: from 23 to 12

Room to move remains even without a wallet, and it is well measured. The average checkout shows 23.48 form elements, 14.88 of them input fields; a short flow manages with 12 to 14 elements, or 7 to 8 when counting input fields only (Baymard Institute). The gap is no special case: for most checkouts a reduction of the displayed form elements by 20 to 60 percent is possible (Baymard Institute). The question is therefore not whether you should remove fields but which ones – and how, without tearing legal or logistical holes.

• Name in one field, do not split first and last name
• Address prefilled by autocomplete instead of typed manually
• Company name shown only for B2B customers, not by default
• Date of birth requested only for age verification or invoice purchase
• Phone number marked as optional if the carrier does not strictly need it
• Email and password not forced in the first step – offer guest checkout visibly
• Country prefilled from the language and shipping setting
• Shipping address same as billing address set as the default

Besides the number of fields, speed decides. The target values are publicly documented: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 (Google Search Central). In checkout each of these figures has an immediate effect, because nobody waits on a payment page. We describe the technical foundations in our articles on Core Web Vitals and WooCommerce performance.

Implementation in Shopware and WooCommerce

In Shopware 6 two routes lead to a complete express checkout. The first is the payment plugin of the payment service provider in use: it places the buttons directly on the product and cart page and enables Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal as a one-click route. The second is the official PayPal plugin, which brings Apple Pay and Google Pay with it. Both routes are compatible with the storefront architecture of Shopware 6 and can be fitted into existing themes. We accompany selection and implementation as part of our Shopware services.

The technical configuration revolves around a few variables: on which pages do the buttons appear (product, cart, off-canvas cart)? Which shipping regions are permitted? How are incomplete addresses handled? A lean configuration looks like this:

xictron_express_checkout:
  wallets:
    apple_pay: true
    google_pay: true
    paypal: true
    wero: true
  display_on:
    product_page: true
    cart_page: true
    off_canvas_cart: true
    mini_cart: false
  shipping_countries: [DE, AT, CH, NL, BE, FR]
  skip_address_confirmation: true
  passkey_login_fallback: true
  require_phone: false

In WooCommerce the starting point is similar. The official plugins of the common payment service providers support express checkout; the Payment Request API is used as soon as the browser offers it – and that requires HTTPS, as described above. For speed we additionally recommend the measures from our article on checkout optimization and cart abandonment. Anyone customizing WooCommerce heavily should also check whether the theme uses the block-based checkout and not the classic shortcode templates – only then do the wallet integrations work reliably.

Tokenization, mandatory information and consent

Express checkout presumes that card data is not entered anew every time. Technically this is handled by tokenization at the card networks: the card number is replaced by a proxy bound to the device and the transaction. For the shop this means less stored cardholder data and therefore a smaller audit scope under PCI DSS; we summarized the requirements of version 4.0 in the article PCI DSS 4.0 for online shops. In addition, the regulation limits failed attempts: the number of consecutive failed authentication attempts may not exceed five within a given period of time (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389).

Three obligations apply regardless of the chosen method. First the price: a trader offering goods or services to consumers has to state the total prices (Section 3 of the German Price Indication Ordinance) – a wallet button on the product page does not release anyone from that. Second the button itself: it only suffices if it is labeled legibly with nothing other than the words "order with obligation to pay" or a correspondingly unambiguous formulation (Section 312j(3) of the German Civil Code). Third consent: storing information in the terminal equipment of the end user or accessing information already stored there is only permitted if the end user has consented on the basis of clear and comprehensive information (Section 25(1) TDDDG) – the exemption only applies where the access is strictly necessary for the service expressly requested.

Rolling out express checkout in six steps

Express checkout is not a one-day action. With a structured approach the new flow can be rolled out step by step; how long that takes only becomes clear from the initial assessment. We recommend the following route:

1. Baseline analysis: measure abandonment rates per checkout step, count form elements, separate mobile and desktop conversion. Record the starting line.
2. Choose payment methods: check the device mix of the target group, settle on two or three wallets for the start. For Germany typically Apple Pay or Google Pay, PayPal and one credit transfer route based on SEPA Instant.
3. Compare providers: put settlement, chargebacks, credit times, fees and the share of transactions without additional authentication side by side.
4. Integration and testing: embed the buttons on the product, cart and off-canvas page. Play through all payments and refunds in a test environment.
5. Field reduction and guest checkout: slim down the classic checkout in parallel, place the guest checkout visibly, offer passkey login. The target is 12 to 14 form elements.
6. Measure and follow up: after launch, measure conversion, checkout duration and wallet usage over at least 30 days and hold them against the starting line.

The decisive point is measurement. Without a before-and-after comparison the effect cannot be evidenced, and internally nobody believes it. We work with Matomo and server-side recorded events so that the figures stay verifiable. Which key figures are worth tracking is described in the article on conversion rate benchmarks.

How XICTRON speeds up your checkout

XICTRON is an e-commerce agency from Lower Saxony focused on Shopware 6, WooCommerce and individual programming. We accompany shops from the selection of payment methods through to measurement after launch, connect the plugins of the common payment service providers and link the checkout with inventory management and shipping. Our developers work on solutions that comply with the requirements of the GDPR and payment services regulation and that hold up under BNPL regulation as well. The goal stays the same: fewer fields, fewer clicks, a checkout your customers experience as a matter of course.