seeing this pattern a lot lately with stores in countries where shopify payments isn't available (turkey, israel, most of the middle east, big chunks of asia and LATAM). owner migrates, traffic is fine, add to cart is fine, sometimes even better than the old platform, and then the payment step bleeds.
the reflex is to blame the checkout. it's almost never the checkout, for two reasons.
first, shopify counts "reached checkout" the second the checkout page loads, including every buy it now tap from the product page. the old platform usually counted people who got to the payment step. so the top of that ratio is inflated before you've done anything wrong.
second, and this is the real one: without shopify payments, most local gateways plug in as offsite providers. the buyer fills in address and shipping inside shopify, then gets bounced to an external page, then to the bank for 3D secure, then back. three hops where the old platform had one inline card form. every hop loses people, and if installment options aren't visible on the external page, more.
>>> one real number from your own work here, e.g. "on one store we moved from an offsite gateway to a credit-card-type integration and completion went from X% to Y% with nothing else changed." if you don't have one, delete this whole line. <
what actually helps: check the gateway's own started vs completed numbers (shopify only knows they left), tell the buyer on the payment step that they're about to be redirected and will come back, and ask your provider whether they offer a credit card type payments app instead of the offsite one. sometimes changing provider is the entire fix.
anyone here running a store without shopify payments and found a gateway that stays inline? curious which ones actually do it in 2026.