Express checkout

Express checkout is the row of wallet buttons that sits above the ordinary checkout form, under some version of “or pay by card”. Pressing one hands the order to a wallet the buyer is already signed into, which returns a name, a delivery address and a payment method in a sheet the buyer confirms. The form underneath does not go away. It is the path for everyone whose wallet does not hold the right address, or who does not use one, and it is what the whole screen falls back to.

Placement is most of the pattern, which is why the name says “above”. The entire value of a wallet button is skipping the form, so a wallet offered after the form has been filled in has nothing left to save. Putting the row at the top also means it is the first decision on the screen, ahead of the sign-in and guest question, which is the order the buyer would choose if asked: the fastest path first, with everything else still reachable underneath. Baymard’s checkout research keeps finding the same thing, that the number of fields between a buyer and a paid order is the strongest thing a checkout controls.

The near neighbour is guest checkout, and the pair is easy to keep straight: guest checkout removes the account, express checkout removes the form. They solve different halves of the same objection and a good checkout offers both, because a wallet is itself an account and a buyer who declines one may still want the other. Beyond that, the sheet compresses the review the rest of the flow spreads out, so it has to carry what an order summary and a check answers screen would otherwise have shown: what is being bought, where it is going, and the real total including delivery.

Two failures are worth designing against. The address in a wallet is often years old, so the sheet must show it in full and let it be changed there rather than sending the parcel to a former flat. And the row should offer only the wallets the buyer can actually use on this device: five buttons where four are dead ends is not choice, it is a longer form with better graphics. Keep the card path styled as a real option rather than as the punishment for refusing, and let the wallet row be quiet enough that a buyer reading it as a shortcut is right.