The Shopify checkout is the gold standard when it comes to e-commerce checkout experiences. Let's make a similar one on WooCommerce.

We get a ton of questions about how we make the checkout for our WooCommerce projects, because they all look and function completely differently in the default experience. In our opinion, this is a much higher converting design, and results in better long-term sales for our clients. Many also note that these checkouts also look remarkably similar to the Shopify check out experience, which is fairly standard throughout all websites using that CMS.

First let’s look at the good and bad aspects of both of the Shopify and WooCommerce default checkouts, and why we typically end up creating a very similar experience to the Shopify design when creating our websites. Then, we’ll show you how exactly to implement it yourself, leading to more conversions and better UI.

Shopify Checkout Experience

Though Shopify has hundreds of themes, Most to check out experiences are exactly the same. A smooth, well designed, multi step process, that’s made a breeze due to good design and conversion optimization.

Most checkouts are a simple 2-3 step process. They use Ajax for the steps, meaning that you won’t need to reload the page. First, it has you enter your shipping information. If you already have an account, it is typically at this check out step that you were prompted to login. Once you’ve entered this information, the next step is checkout. Here, you enter your payment information which can be anything from PayPal to Stripe, and you now own the product.

The functionality almost directly mirrors WooCommerce, but the design far exceeds it.

Don’t get us wrong, WooCommerce is far superior to Shopify in every way, but they’re lacking when it come to checkout.

WooCommerce Checkout Experience

This is generalizing a lot, because the WooCommerce checkout varies widely between teams, but in most cases it is lacking the design and usability that customers have come to expect with professional e-commerce websites. Because of that, they may find it difficult to use, and you may be missing out on sales. There are several aspects of the WooCommerce cart and check experience that we specifically do not like.

It’s not as clean, its difficult to edit your cart, you can’t easily understand what you’re buying during the checkout process, and it doesn’t use Ajax out of the box, so you’re reloading multiple times.

It works, but it could just be better.

Because we use Oxygen Builder for 99% of our projects now, these issues are furthered, as the tool only allows for minimal customization of the general styling and functionality that comes with WooCommerce out of the box.

How To Make A “Shopify-Like” Checkout In WooCommerce

You may be surprised to learn that there is a single plug-in that automatically generates these templates, and all we need to do is install and activate it. There is some design and functionality customization, which we will touch upon, but this solution is pretty much set and forget.

We use a plugin called CheckoutWC, which essentially is a carbon copy of the Shopify Checkout design, with some additional features.

We chose this plugin because it’s designed for conversion, and remedies all the negatives that we have identified with the WooCommerce platform.

There are several main features that we like. Easy express checkout. Account creation/login with automatic lookup and simple creation. Auto fill addresses and integration with the Google Maps API, and direct integration with major WooCommerce plugins.

Everything is done via Ajax, keeping the customer on the page.

It was almost as if the company behind the product decided to copy the Shopify check out design, but implement more functionality and integration with WooCommerce, supercharging the e-commerce platform, and fixing the one problem with it: an annoying checkout experience.

There are several other check out customization tools created specifically for WooCommerce websites, but this is the best one on the market, and we’ve tried all of them out in the past. You can’t beat the price to feature to design to usability ratio of CheckoutWC.

We install this on virtually all of our clients e-commerce projects because of this. Best of all, it integrates 100% with Oxygen Builder, and is the best solution if you’re looking for a simple way to implement a well designed, feature filled, conversion optimized checkout in a WooCommece store.