Most companies work hard to get people to their website or app. They spend money on ads, build strong brands, and tune their product pages.
But when it comes to checkout, many teams simply say, “We just need a page that works.”
That attitude is expensive.
Checkout is no longer a footnote
Checkout is where interest turns into revenue. A small problem in this part of the journey can mean a large loss in sales. Many studies show that the average cart abandonment rate is close to 70%. In other words, most people who start to buy never finish.
This is why embedded checkout matters. Instead of sending people to a separate payment page on another site, embedded checkout keeps the payment step inside your own site or app. It turns checkout from a basic form into a powerful growth tool.
In this article, we will look at what embedded checkout is, how it boosts conversion and average order value, why native checkout now feels like table stakes, and how to estimate the revenue you may be losing at this last step.
What embedded checkout really is
Embedded checkout is a payment experience that lives inside your own product. When a shopper decides to buy, they stay on your site or inside your app for the entire checkout. They never feel like they went somewhere else to pay.
In a traditional flow, a buyer might click “Pay,” then get pushed to a separate website that belongs to a payment provider. The design looks different, the URL changes, and the entire experience feels like a hand off.
When the payment is done, the buyer may be sent back to your site for a confirmation screen. This style is often called a hosted page or redirect checkout.
With embedded checkout, the flow is different. The buyer clicks “Pay,” and a form appears as part of your page, maybe as a section, a pop up, or a slide out. The branding matches your product. The fonts, colors, and buttons all feel like you. The buyer stays in one place from the moment they decide to purchase until the payment is complete.
This difference matters. When you own the whole checkout experience, you control the design, the copy, the payment options, and how you collect and use data.
You can see where users drop off, when they get errors, and what payment methods they prefer. That information helps you improve the journey over time.
This kind of smooth, frictionless checkout is what people now expect. Apps like Uber, Amazon, and Apple have trained us to pay in just a few taps without ever thinking about who actually moves the money.
For many buyers, a clumsy or jarring checkout now feels broken, even when it works. Embedded checkout brings your experience closer to the standard set by those leaders.
From simple UX fix, to growth engine
For a long time, teams saw checkout mainly as a technical problem. The questions were often, “Is this form secure? Is it compliant? Does it connect to our gateway?” As long as the answer was yes, many companies stopped thinking about it.
Today, that view is too narrow. Checkout is no longer just plumbing. It is a key part of your growth engine.
A better checkout flow can raise your conversion rate at the final step. It can nudge up your average order value by making it easy to add more items or move to a higher plan. It can also improve your lifetime value by making renewals and repeat purchases smooth and fast.
One of the biggest gains comes from simply reducing friction. Every extra click, extra field, and extra page load is an opening for doubt or delay. Someone might decide to come back later and never return.
Someone might get distracted by a message, a child, or another tab. On mobile, a slow or complex page can be the difference between a sale and a close.
Redirects are a special type of friction. When you send buyers off your site to pay, they see a new URL and a different design. Even if the page is safe, it can feel risky. Some users wonder if they are being scammed. Others simply do not like the experience and drop off.
Embedded checkout keeps everything in one place. Buyers stay on your domain, see your design, and read your messages. You can explain how you keep their data safe in your own words. You can show progress, handle errors clearly, and reassure people when something goes wrong. This calm, consistent experience helps users complete their purchase.
It also opens the door to higher average order value. When checkout is native and flexible, you can gently offer add ons and upgrades inside the same flow.
For example, you might show an option to extend a warranty, add extra seats to a software plan, or bundle a related product. Because the offer appears at a natural moment and the flow stays simple, people are more likely to accept.
Bryan Long, Senior Director of Product Management, APIs at North, describes this shift in mindset:
"Some companies think checkout was just a form to be bolted on at the end of the journey. North treats it like a product of its own."
Native, in flow checkout beats hosted pages
To see why embedded checkout works so well, it helps to compare it to a typical hosted checkout page.
In a hosted flow, a buyer spends time on your site looking at products. They add something to a cart and click to pay. Then, suddenly, they are taken to a third party payment page. The logo, fonts, and layout may be different.
The URL likely changes. If their browser is strict, they may see warnings about scripts or content. Once they enter their card details, they are sent back to your site for a thank you message.
Every one of those jumps adds risk. The redirect can be slow. The new page may not work well on older phones. Some users close the tab because they do not like the look of the new page or they worry about security. If something breaks in the hand off back to your site, they may not be sure whether their payment went through.
In a native embedded flow, none of this happens. The buyer moves from “decide to buy” to “payment confirmed” without ever leaving your environment. The form is part of your layout. Errors are handled in the same style as the rest of your product. If there is a delay, you can show a clear message in your own tone, which builds trust.
This difference has a direct impact on cart abandonment. Many of the common reasons for abandonment, such as confusing pages, surprise steps, strange redirects, and slow loads, are made worse by hosted flows. Embedded checkout removes or reduces many of those triggers.
It also gives you more control over the content and order of your steps. You can collect only the details you really need. You can support guest checkout first, and then invite users to create an account after they pay. You can place taxes, fees, and shipping costs in clear view so buyers are not surprised at the last second. All of this leads to more completed checkouts without any extra ad spend.
Embedded checkout is now table stakes
A few years ago, embedded checkout felt like something only the largest companies could do. Now it is within reach for most SaaS products, marketplaces, and platforms. In many categories, it has become the basic expectation rather than a special feature.
In SaaS, users expect to upgrade plans, add seats, and manage billing inside the app. Being sent to a separate site to change a credit card or renew a subscription feels dated. In marketplaces, buyers expect to pay the marketplace itself.
They want one simple, consistent checkout, not a mix of different seller pages. In vertical platforms like gym software, clinic tools, or school systems, members and clients want payments for bookings, dues, and extras to feel like part of the main experience.
If your checkout feels more like 2010 than 2026, users notice. They may not be able to explain it in technical terms, but they can feel the friction. And many will quietly move to a competitor whose experience feels smoother and more modern.
Beyond user expectations, embedded checkout also has deeper strategic benefits. Because the whole flow runs through your own front end, you can collect detailed event data. You can see where people drop out of the flow, which payment options they pick, how often cards fail, and when retries work. That data feeds back into product decisions and marketing ideas.
Embedded checkout also becomes the base for more advanced money features. Once you have a native way to collect payments, it is easier to add subscriptions, usage based billing, pay by bank options, or even financing and other embedded finance tools later on.
In other words, getting checkout right is not just a one time win. It sets you up for new revenue streams over time.
Measure the revenue you lose at checkout today
It can be hard to act on a vague sense that your checkout could be better. A simple way to make the case is to measure how much you might be losing at this step right now.
Step 1
Start by mapping your basic funnel. For most online products, it looks something like this. People visit your site or app, they view a product or plan page, they start checkout, and some of them complete payment.
You want to know how many people you have at each of those steps, and how many you lose between “start checkout” and “payment success.”
Step 2
Once you have those numbers, you can calculate your checkout conversion rate. That is the number of successful payments divided by the number of checkout starts. If 5,000 people start checkout in a month and 3,500 finish, your checkout conversion rate is 70%.
Step 3
The next step is to ask what a realistic target might be with a smoother, embedded experience. You might not know the exact number, but you can test a simple scenario. For example, what if you could raise checkout conversion from 70% to 80%?
The math is straightforward. Suppose you have 5,000 checkout starts per month, a current checkout conversion of 70%, a target of 80%, and an average order value of $100. The extra 10 percentage points of conversion would mean 500 more successful payments each month.
At $100 per order, that is $50,000 in additional monthly revenue, or $600,000 per year, without bringing in any more traffic.
Even if your gains are smaller, such as two or three percentage points, the annual impact can still be large. This kind of estimate helps leaders see embedded checkout not as a nice to have, but as a clear growth project with a strong business case.
Step 4
From there, you can look more closely at where people are getting stuck. You might find that many users drop off right when the redirect happens, or that errors spike on certain fields on mobile devices.
Those insights will tell you where an embedded, in flow checkout could make the biggest difference.
Get started with embedded checkout
Once you see the value, the next question is how to move forward.
Some very large or specialized companies choose to build their own payment flows from the ground up. They may have big engineering teams and unique needs, such as complex rules or strict regulations in many countries.
For most organizations, though, a better path is to work with a partner that offers embedded checkout as part of a modern payments platform.
A good partner will give you flexible building blocks, such as ready made checkout components and strong APIs, that drop into your app or website. They will handle the hard parts of security, compliance, and connections to banks and card networks.
Your team can then focus on designing the journey, shaping the offers, and testing changes.
Success usually takes more than just plugging in a new form. It works best when product managers, designers, engineers, and revenue leaders see checkout as a shared responsibility. Product and design can map out the simplest path to payment.
Engineering can make sure it is fast and reliable. Marketing and growth teams can test different offers and messages. Finance and risk teams can keep an eye on fees, chargebacks, and rules.
When everyone sees checkout as a key part of the customer journey, not just as back office plumbing, the experience gets better for users and the numbers improve for the business.
Make checkout a first class growth priority
Checkout is not a small detail. It is the moment where all your marketing, product work, and brand building either pays off or falls apart.
By moving to embedded checkout, you keep buyers inside your own experience. You reduce clicks and redirects, lower cart abandonment, and build more trust.
You open the door to higher conversion, higher average order value, and better long term customer value. You also gain the data and control you need to keep improving over time.
If you have not looked closely at your checkout in a while, now is a good time. Map your funnel. Measure your current checkout conversion. Do a simple estimate of what a few extra percentage points would mean in real money.
Then decide how embedded checkout fits into your roadmap.
The growth lever you are looking for may not be a new campaign or a new feature. It may be the experience your customers already see every day, the final step of their journey at checkout.
Sources
- FastSpring, “How Changes to Your Checkout Can Affect Conversion Rates”, (May 22, 2025), retrieved February 3, 2026
- Baymard Institute, “Cart & Checkout Usability Research”, retrieved February 3, 2026
- Contact Pigeon, “Checkout Abandonment: All the Stats and Metrics for Retailers (2024)”, (September, 20, 2024), retrieved February 3, 2026
- Stripe, “Testing the conversion impact of 50+ global payment methods“, (April 10, 2025), retrieved February 3, 2026
- FERMÀT, “E-commerce Conversion Rate Optimization”, (June 5, 2025), retrieved February 3, 2026
North is a leading financial technology company that builds innovative, frictionless end-to-end payment solutions designed to simplify and grow businesses of all sizes. From the front door, to the back office, the developer world, and partnerships that expand the payments landscape, North offers proactive, comprehensive merchant services, in-house processing, and more.
