Should Your Shopify Store Skip the Cart and Go Straight to Checkout?

Most Shopify stores should not skip the cart. Sending shoppers straight to checkout suits a store that sells one product bought one at a time, where there is nothing to add and nothing to review. Any store where a second item is possible gives up its best chance to raise order value by skipping, and is better served by a cart drawer. This guide compares the three flows, says which fits which kind of store, and sets out what you lose and how to keep both options open.

What are the three flows?

• Cart page. Adding a product takes the shopper to a separate page listing the cart. To keep shopping they have to navigate back.
• Cart drawer. Adding a product opens a panel over the current page with the cart and a checkout button. Closing it leaves the shopper where they were.
• Direct to checkout. The buy button skips the cart and opens Shopify's checkout with that product in it. Shopify themes commonly offer this as a 'Buy it now' button beside 'Add to cart'.

When does going straight to checkout make sense?

When the order cannot grow and does not need reviewing.

• Single-product stores. One product, usually one unit. A cart with one line in it adds a step and no information.
• Landing pages from ads. The page has made the case for one offer. The next click should be payment.

Even here, check your assumption. A single-product store that sells refills, a multi-pack or an accessory is not really a single-product store, and those extras need somewhere to be offered.

What do you lose by skipping the cart?

Every lever that works on order value between product and payment:

• The rewards bar. There is nowhere to tell the shopper they are a few dollars from free shipping.
• In-cart offers. The complement or refill that goes with the product has no place to appear.
• Add-ons. Gift wrap, a gift message, package protection.
• The review moment. A shopper who sees their cart catches the wrong size or quantity before paying, not after.

Checkout is built for paying. It is deliberately spare, and on most Shopify plans a merchant can change little about it. What you do not offer before checkout mostly goes unoffered.

There is a second cost. A shopper sent to checkout after the first product has been told the shop visit is over. If they wanted two things, they now have to back out of checkout to find the second.

Which flow suits multi-item baskets?

A drawer. When shoppers typically buy several items, the flow has to make adding the next one easy, and the two alternatives both get in the way.

A cart page interrupts after every addition: add, land on the cart, navigate back, find your place, add again. Direct checkout assumes the first item is the last. A drawer confirms the addition, shows the running total and the distance to any reward, and closes.

Keep the cart page working all the same. Links from emails and saved bookmarks still land on it.

Which flow suits high-ticket products?

A cart step, as a drawer or a page. A shopper spending a large sum wants to see what they are about to pay for: the exact configuration, the delivery terms, the total. Moving them from product page to payment form in one click can feel abrupt at the point where reassurance matters most.

High-ticket carts are also where add-ons earn their place. Protection, installation, an extended care kit and similar extras are small next to the main purchase and relevant to it. They need a cart to live in, and they must be opt-in.

The exception is a high-ticket store with one product and no extras, where the product page has already done the reassuring. There, a direct button is reasonable.

Can you offer both?

Yes, and for most stores it is the right answer. Keep 'Add to cart' as the main button, opening the drawer, and keep a buy-now button beside it for the shopper in a hurry.

The shopper who wants to pay immediately has a direct route. Everyone else sees the drawer, where the checkout button is one tap away.

If your theme's own drawer is too limited to carry a rewards bar or offers, an app can replace it. Marka Cart Drawer opens when a product is added, takes its colours, fonts and button shape from your theme, and is switched on as an app embed without editing theme code.

If you do skip the cart, where do the offers go?

To either side of checkout.

• Before: on the product page. Bundles, quantity breaks and 'frequently bought with' offers do the work the cart would have done. Marka Bundles & Upsells is our app for that.
• After: on the thank-you and order status pages, which every buyer sees. Ideas for those are in what to put on the Shopify thank-you and order status pages.

How do you decide for your own store?

Test it. Run the direct flow against the drawer and compare profit per visitor, not conversion rate alone. Direct checkout can win on the share of visitors who complete an order while losing on what each order is worth. Our guide to measuring whether a cart change raised order value covers how to read the result.

If the drawer loses shoppers, look at the drawer before you remove it. The usual culprits are in cart abandonment causes you can fix inside the cart.

A short checklist

1. Count the products a typical order contains. If the answer is always one, direct checkout is worth testing.
2. List what you could offer in a cart: a threshold, a complement, an add-on. If the list is empty, the cart has little to do.
3. Default to a drawer for multi-item and high-ticket stores.
4. Keep a buy-now button beside add-to-cart for shoppers in a hurry.
5. Keep the cart page working as a fallback.
6. Compare flows on profit per visitor.

For what a drawer should contain once you have chosen it, see our cart drawer guide. To replace your theme's cart with a drawer that carries rewards and offers, see Marka Cart Drawer.