- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
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Most merchants spend the days before a big sale obsessing over promotions and ads, then launch without testing the one thing that actually converts browsers into buyers: the checkout. Checkout Optimization starts with Wix Checkout Preview, a built-in feature that lets you walk the complete buyer journey before a single real order is placed.
A broken promo code, an unexpected shipping cost or a payment option that doesn't show on mobile can erase all the traffic you paid to drive. Wix gives you a built-in tool to catch all of that before anyone sees it: Wix Checkout Preview. It lets you walk the complete buyer journey, from customer detail fields through to the Thank You page and the confirmation email, before a single real order is placed.
If you haven't built your store yet, start with your eCommerce website on Wix and all of these tools are available from day one.
This checklist covers 12 things to verify before your next sale event, product launch or seasonal campaign. If you're still setting up your store, checkout customization with Wix is handled entirely from your dashboard, not the editor. And if you want a broader look at what's involved in selling online before you run your first sale, that guide covers the full picture.
TL;DR: checkout optimization with Wix Checkout Preview
Here's the full 12-point checklist at a glance:
Step | What to check |
01. Open Wix Checkout Preview | Go to Checkout Settings → Preview Checkout. Walk the full buyer flow. |
02. Switch to mobile view | Click the Mobile icon. Check fields, buttons and payment options on small screens. |
03. Enable guest checkout | Confirm buyers can complete an order without creating an account. |
04. Verify payment methods | Confirm every active provider displays correctly, including digital wallets. |
05. Check shipping costs appear early | Costs and delivery dates should be visible before the payment step. |
06. Test every promo code | Apply each active discount code and confirm it reduces the total correctly. |
07. Trim your checkout form fields | Toggle non-essential fields to optional. Less friction = more completions. |
08. Check trust signals | Reviews, security badges and your refund policy should be visible near checkout. |
09. Preview the Thank You page and confirmation email | Confirm both include payment confirmation, order summary and support info. |
10. Place a live test order | Enable manual payment, log in to Members Area and complete a real checkout flow. |
11. Audit inventory for promoted products | Flag low or zero stock. Set out-of-stock labels or restrict checkout. |
12. Add return policy reassurance near the CTA | A short policy line near Place Order reduces hesitation for first-time buyers. |
Ready to launch your eCommerce business? With Wix eCommerce, you can build a professional online store that attracts customers, drives sales and grows your brand. Enjoy full customization, built-in SEO and powerful marketing tools, all in one platform. Start today and turn your vision into success.
Checkout optimization checklist
Work through these steps in order in your Wix dashboard before your sale goes live. Each one targets a specific friction point that causes cart abandonment.
01. Open Wix Checkout Preview and walk the full buyer journey
Wix Checkout Preview lets you walk through the complete customer experience, from customer detail fields and delivery options through to the Thank You page and confirmation email, before your store goes live.
To access Wix Checkout Preview, go to Checkout Settings in your dashboard and click Preview Checkout. Select one or more items from the top bar to see how the page looks for different product types. You can also click the Preview tab when customizing your eCommerce checkout form to see changes in real time.
Note: if you want to preview using the 'Buy Now' button and it's not available, use 'Add to Cart' instead. Only the site owner can run a checkout preview, not site admins or team members with other roles. The ability to preview the checkout page is not yet available for all sites.
02. Switch to mobile view
Mobile commerce accounted for $2.51 trillion in global sales in 2025, representing nearly 59% of all worldwide eCommerce, according to Capital One Shopping Research. Yet despite this shift, mobile checkout abandonment remains significantly higher than desktop, reaching 85.65% compared to 70.19% overall, according to the Baymard Institute.
The gap is almost entirely a friction problem. In Wix Checkout Preview, click the Mobile icon at the top of the screen and check every element: button size, field legibility and whether all payment options display clearly. A field that looks fine on desktop can overlap or truncate on a 375px screen. For more context on mobile shopping behavior, the eCommerce statistics guide covers the benchmarks worth knowing before you set your sale targets.
03. Enable guest checkout
Forcing account creation before checkout is one of the most reliable ways to lose a sale. Baymard Institute research consistently ranks it among the top three reasons for checkout abandonment.
When you add Wix Stores to your site, the Members Area is added automatically so customers can log in to save their details and view past orders. You can remove the login requirement by deleting the Members Area from your site or configuring it so login is optional rather than mandatory. Before your sale goes live, confirm in Checkout Preview that a first-time visitor can complete an order without being asked to register.
04. Verify all payment methods are active and visible
If a customer's preferred payment method isn't available at your checkout, a meaningful percentage will leave and not come back. In your Wix dashboard, confirm that Wix Payments is active and that any additional connected providers, including PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, are showing correctly in the checkout preview.
Over 60 million US shoppers used buy now pay later services in 2025, particularly for higher-priced items. If your products sit in a price range where installment options affect the purchase decision, verify that Klarna or Afterpay appear correctly in the payment selection step. Mariia Liakhova, Product Marketing Manager for Payments at Wix, puts it plainly: the checkout experience customers see is clean, professional and trustworthy, and that trust plays a direct role in conversion.
05. Check that shipping costs appear before the payment step
Hidden costs at checkout drive away nearly half of all potential buyers. Lisa Kammermayer, Chief Marketing Officer at SimpleSell, is direct about it: once customers notice shipping costs at checkout that they weren't expecting, there is a high risk they will abandon the purchase and look for alternative providers.
"High shipping costs are the most common reason for shopping cart abandonment." — Lisa Kammermayer, Chief Marketing Officer at SimpleSell
In Wix Checkout Preview, verify that estimated delivery dates and shipping costs are visible to customers before they reach the payment screen. If your store offers free shipping above a threshold, confirm the 'Add X more for free shipping' reminder appears in the cart view. If you're running a time-limited campaign, the eCommerce promotions with Wix settings let you add banners and callouts to flag shipping cutoff dates directly in your store.
06. Test every active promo code end-to-end
A promo code field that doesn't work creates two problems at once: customers who can't apply their code abandon the order, and customers who find an unintended code cost you margin. In the Wix checkout, a promo code link appears by default in both the cart page and the Order Summary section.
Before your sale, apply each discount code you plan to run and confirm it reduces the total correctly for every product type it's supposed to cover. For managing eCommerce discounts with Wix, the dashboard lets you set usage limits, expiry dates and minimum order thresholds all in one place.
07. Trim your checkout form fields
Every required field that isn't strictly necessary to complete an order is a friction point. Wix allows you to add custom fields to your checkout form, toggle which fields are required versus optional, and set placeholder text that guides customers through.
Before your sale, go to Checkout Settings → Edit under Checkout form and review every field. Phone numbers, for example, are often set to required by default but are rarely operationally necessary. As part of your what is checkout customization review, also check the checkout header, site policies and any additional fees or cart validations that could create unexpected friction.
Adi Avraham, Senior SEO Growth at Wix, captures the principle well: the key to online sales is making it simple for your customers. With Wix, you can customize checkout flows, offer discounts and track abandoned carts without needing a developer.
08. Check trust signals and review visibility near checkout
Customers arriving at your store during a sale event are often first-time visitors who found you via an ad or a shared link. They have no prior relationship with your brand, so what they see near the payment step has to do the work that years of brand trust would otherwise do. Ensure product reviews are accessible before the final purchase step, and that security badges covering payment safety are visible on the checkout page.
"The key to online sales is making it simple for your customers. With Wix, you can customize checkout flows, offer discounts and even track abandoned carts without a developer." — Adi Avraham, Senior SEO Growth at Wix
For merchants who want to understand the broader landscape of AI in eCommerce and how AI-driven personalization is shaping buyer trust, AI-powered personalization can lift eCommerce conversion rates by up to 23% through real-time behavior analysis. Trust and relevance go hand in hand at the checkout.
09. Preview the Thank You page and confirmation email
The Thank You page is the first thing a customer sees after completing a purchase. The confirmation email is often the first thing they return to if something goes wrong. Wix Checkout Preview lets you view both before you go live, use it.
In the Preview, click through past the payment step to see the Thank You page. This is also where customizing the Thank You page becomes important, since it ensures customers immediately see clear confirmation, order details and next steps that match your brand experience. Check that it confirms payment, shows the order summary, includes the delivery address and estimated arrival and provides support contact details.
The confirmation email should be checked on both mobile and desktop. If you offer product subscriptions, note that it's not currently possible to do a test purchase of a subscription on a live site. For stores that use back-in-stock alerts as part of their pre-sale strategy, back in stock pre alerts with Wix eCommerce can be configured from your dashboard to capture demand for items that run out during a campaign.
10. Place a full test order on your live site
The dashboard preview shows you the layout. A live test order shows you what a real customer actually experiences. This option is available for Wix Stores and Wix Restaurants Orders. To run one without being charged, enable the manual payment method first. If your site has a Premium plan, temporarily unassign it or test on a duplicated version of your site. Then log in to your Members Area, navigate to a store product, add it to your cart, click Checkout and select 'I just want to place a test order' when prompted.
Once you've completed the test, open the confirmation email and check it on mobile and desktop. Jenna Spencer, co-owner of The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, learned the hard way what it means to need an online store in a hurry: after a single Instagram post went viral and generated thousands of orders overnight, she needed Wix to give her the agility to adapt immediately. Testing before you go live is how you make sure you're ready when that kind of demand arrives.
For an overview of all available eCommerce features in Wix, the platform covers everything from inventory management to multi-currency checkout.
11. Audit inventory levels for every promoted product
Selling a product that's out of stock is one of the more damaging things that can happen at checkout. A customer who reaches the payment step only to find an item is unavailable doesn't just abandon that order: they're unlikely to return.
Before your sale, go through your product catalog in the Wix dashboard and audit stock levels for every item you're promoting. For items with low or zero stock, set them to display an out-of-stock label or restrict checkout for those variants. If you're planning to capture pre-sale demand, how to set up preorders with Wix eCommerce walks through how to use the pre-order feature to sell before inventory arrives.
Arkady Kovalev, founder of Heroes INN in Germany, uses Wix presales to sell products months before they arrive. His store sells One Piece collectibles months in advance, which means he never oversells and never disappoints customers at checkout. "People are buying like there's no tomorrow for One Piece," Kovalev says. "We are already selling products for One Piece that are coming out in September." That kind of inventory confidence starts with knowing exactly what's in stock before a sale goes live.
12. Add return policy reassurance near the Place Order button
First-time buyers, especially those arriving from a paid ad with no prior relationship with your brand, need to feel that buying from you carries low risk.
A clear, visible return and refund policy at the final step of checkout reduces hesitation. In your Wix checkout, you can add your site's policies as clickable links in the footer of the checkout page, or as a policy checkbox that customers must agree to before completing their order.
A short line near the Place Order button, such as '30-day hassle-free returns,' can meaningfully reduce drop-off at the final step.
Why checkout optimization matters before a big sale
According to Capital One Shopping Research, cart abandonment sits at 70.19% on average, and climbs to 85.65% on mobile. For a standard day of traffic, that's a frustrating baseline. For a sale event where you're spending on promotions and driving significantly more visitors, it's an expensive problem that compounds with every hour the sale runs.
A broken promo code or a missing payment method during peak traffic is orders of magnitude more costly. For a deeper look at how eCommerce hosting affects your store's ability to handle traffic spikes, infrastructure reliability is as important as checkout UX when planning a high-traffic event.
The good news: most checkout abandonment is caused by fixable friction, not customers changing their minds. Nir Zohar, President and Co-founder at Wix, framed the shift happening across eCommerce this way: "AI is transforming how people shop, and our collaboration with PayPal will put Wix merchants at the forefront of that shift."
The rise of agentic commerce and AI-driven checkout means that merchants who have their fundamentals in order, clean forms, transparent pricing, trusted payment options, will be better positioned to take advantage of what's coming than those who don't.
Maya Isak, eCommerce Project Marketing Manager at Wix, captures the platform's approach: "Wix Harmony lets a seller go from a prompt to a fully functional online store with a responsive product page, the complete Stores vertical wired in and business tools ready to use from day one. That's not a simplified version of the platform, that's the real thing, generated from the start." For merchants exploring how Wix AI agents for eCommerce can automate parts of the post-purchase flow, from confirmation emails to back-in-stock alerts, the tools are available as part of the same platform.
How to access and use Wix Checkout Preview
There are two ways to preview your checkout on Wix. The dashboard preview shows the form layout with a sample order. The live site test order replicates the real customer experience including the confirmation email. Before you can preview checkout at all, your site needs to: be upgraded to a Premium or Studio plan, have a payment provider connected, and have shipping or delivery set up (required for stores and restaurants).
For the dashboard preview:
Step 1: Go to Checkout Settings in your site's dashboard.
Step 2: Click Preview Checkout.
Step 3: Select one or more items from the top bar to see how the page looks for different product types.
Step 4: Click the Mobile icon to preview on a small screen.
Step 5: Review customer detail fields, delivery fields and the order summary.
For the live site test order:
Step 1: Enable the manual payment method so you won't be charged.
Step 2: If your site has a Premium or Studio plan, temporarily unassign it or duplicate your site to test on a copy.
Step 3: If you don't have a members area, add one now.
Step 4: Open your live site and log in through the Members Area.
Step 5: Navigate to a store product, add it to your cart and click Checkout.
Step 6: Select 'I just want to place a test order' when prompted.
Step 7: Check the confirmation email you receive on both mobile and desktop.
For merchants building their store from scratch, understanding how to start a website and how to configure the online store settings from the start will save time when running this checklist.
More things to explore with Wix eCommerce
Once your checkout is optimized, here are additional Wix eCommerce capabilities worth exploring as you scale:
Wix Harmony for AI-powered store generation
eCommerce localization Wix for selling in multiple languages and currencies
print on demand for launching a product line without holding inventory
If you're thinking about the bigger picture, can I sell products with Wix covers the full range of what's possible across physical products, digital downloads, services and subscriptions.
And if you want to understand how your store fits into the broader ecosystem, types of eCommerce breaks down the different business models and where Wix fits within each. For those interested in the website builder side of Wix more broadly, the platform supports everything from single-product stores to multi-vertical eCommerce operations.
Checkout optimization with Wix Checkout Preview FAQ
How do I preview the checkout process on Wix?
Go to Checkout Settings in your dashboard and click Preview Checkout. Select one or more items to see how the page looks for different product types, and click the Mobile icon to check the mobile view. For a full live-site test, enable manual payment, log in to your Members Area, add a product to your cart, click Checkout and select 'I just want to place a test order'.
Can I test Wix checkout without being charged?
Yes. Enable the manual payment method before placing a test order and you won't be charged. If your site has a Premium or Studio plan, temporarily unassign the plan or test on a duplicated version of your site to avoid creating a live order.
Does Wix support guest checkout?
Yes. By default Wix Stores adds a Members Area to your site where customers can log in to save their details and view orders. You can allow guest checkout by removing the login requirement, either by deleting the Members Area from your site or configuring it so login is optional at checkout.
How do I reduce cart abandonment before a big sale?
The 12-step checklist in this article covers the main levers: guest checkout, transparent pricing, mobile optimization, trusted payment options and testing the full flow with Wix Checkout Preview before launch.
