How retailers can reduce guest checkout friction ahead of holiday shopping

For retailers, this challenge intensifies during the holidays, when customers have long shopping lists but short attention spans. But the problem doesn’t disappear in January. Checkout friction chips away at sales every day of the year. That leaves room for improvement in the guest checkout experience.

Checkout challenges

Industry data shows how common this drop-off has become. Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. shoppers will abandon a cart when forced to create an account, according to the Baymard Institute. Others begin filling out forms, only to get distracted, lose focus or decide the process is taking too long. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: a purchase left unfinished.

For merchants, this can feel like a losing battle. Many of these behaviors are outside their direct control, yet the pressure to hit revenue goals remains. That’s why refining the guest checkout path has become so important, particularly heading into the busiest shopping months. Retailers need solutions that reduce friction for shoppers while being simple to put in place.

A new option for faster guest checkout

Fastlane by PayPal is a passwordless checkout experience that uses secure data vaulting to streamline guest checkout for shoppers. Built into Payment Services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, it’s easy for merchants to enable and start offering a faster checkout. During guest checkout, shoppers see the option to save their details, creating a Fastlane profile that securely stores their payment and shipping information in PayPal’s network.

At first glance, it might sound like creating another account. The difference is scale and choice. Shoppers decide when and where to opt in, and once they do, their profile works across any Fastlane-enabled retailer. That means a single setup unlocks faster checkout everywhere Fastlane is offered: entering an email triggers a one-time passcode, details autofill and checkout is nearly instant.

The first time: Shoppers can choose to save their information during guest checkout.

Every time after: Returning Fastlane users are recognized by email, confirm with a code and their details autofill across retailers.

The impact of reducing friction shows up quickly in the numbers. Retailers using Fastlane report:

• Fastlane users convert around 37% higher compared with other guest shoppers.
• Guest shoppers using Fastlane have been shown to check out more than 31% faster compared with other guest shoppers.
• Fastlane’s accelerated shoppers have been shown to have 71% fewer disputes than guest shoppers by performing several risk checks during authentication and transaction assessment.

For shoppers, these changes feel almost invisible: a faster path, fewer interruptions, more trust. For merchants, the payoff is just as real. The challenge is making those improvements quickly, especially with holiday traffic at the door.

Built for merchants under pressure

Holiday shoppers want fast, secure checkout, but delivering it often requires complex rework behind the scenes. With peak season looming, few have the runway to redesign checkout from scratch and need to be able to implement solutions fast.

For Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source merchants, enabling Fastlane is designed to be straightforward. It’s activated in the Admin panel, with no additional development required. That simplicity allows retailers to respond quickly to seasonal demands. And the same principle applies more broadly: Treating payments as a strategic capability, not just a back-end utility, opens new opportunities for efficiency and growth over time.

For merchants, progress doesn’t have to wait until after the holidays. Improvements made to guest checkout now maximize seasonal performance and create a payments foundation that drives results into the year ahead.

Sponsored by Adobe