Cart abandonment rates surpass 70% for online shopping. Making your checkout simpler is one way to improve conversion. Embedded payments put a checkout flow inside your own product rather than redirecting users to a third-party page, and you can customize the checkout flow’s visual design, error messages, form fields, sequence, and post-payment flow.

Below, we’ll cover how embedded payments customization works, what the risks are, and how to consider which customizations are worth making.

Highlights

• Using embedded payments to customize your checkout can provide a better payment experience for your customers.

• Customizing which payment methods appear, what order checkout elements appear in, and under what conditions has the potential to substantially improve conversion.

• The more you customize, the more you have to maintain. Strong customization decisions are made when there are specific gaps in the default checkout experience.

How do you customize the checkout experience with embedded payments?

You can customize the checkout experience with embedded payments by changing what the form looks like, which fields appear, in what order they appear, and what happens after a failed or successful payment. This can make the checkout experience simpler for your customers and more aligned with your overall branding.

There are a few ways you can implement this customization. It’s possible to build a custom solution from scratch, but doing so can be time-intensive. Using an established provider such as Stripe to set your preferences allows you to start quickly.

What can you customize with embedded payments?

The embedded approach gives you control over how the checkout looks, which payment methods appear, what fields are shown, and what happens after a payment is confirmed.

Here’s exactly what you can control:

• Visual styling: You can set typography, color palette, and more.

• Payment method display: User interface (UI) components for the web can be used to dynamically display relevant payment methods based on currency, customer location, and transaction amount.

• Form fields: If you want to collect a phone number or custom metadata, you can add those fields and incorporate them into the layout.

• Post-payment flow: After confirmation, you define what happens. Your payment provider can render its own success state, which confirms to the user that the process is complete, or you can intercept the confirmation event and handle it yourself.

• Localization: You can set the locale explicitly or let it inherit from the browser. Field labels, error messages, and payment method descriptions all localize automatically.

Through solutions such as Stripe’s Elements Appearance API, changes cascade across all embedded components simultaneously, so you don’t have to change individual elements.

What makes a great payment experience?

Speed and clarity are important factors that separate a good checkout from one that customers abandon. Every additional field or page transition is a place where customers might doubt themselves.

Here’s what makes a payment experience positive for the customer:

• Field labels: These need to describe what’s expected, not just name the field. “Card number” is fine, but “Enter the 16-digit number on the front of your card” works better in contexts where your customers aren’t frequent online shoppers.

• Error messages: These must name the problem and suggest the fix. “Invalid card number” is less useful than “Check that you’ve entered all 16 digits.”

• Payment method presentation: This needs to match your customer base. If most of your users are in Germany, Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debit needs to be prominent; if they’re in Brazil, Pix matters. Showing an overwhelming number of payment options to a user who only recognizes one can add friction.

• Confirmation states: These must be unambiguous. Users need to know the payment worked before they leave your site.

Why is it helpful to customize checkouts with embedded payments?

The checkout is part of your product, and your product has a specific context that a generic checkout can’t incorporate. Customizing checkout can help customers feel more confident and align the experience with their expectations.

Here’s how that works in practice:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) conversion flows: If you’re running a 14-day trial, the moment a customer decides to pay is the culmination of two weeks of engagement. A jarring visual shift to a generic checkout page at that moment is a user experience (UX) regression.

• Trust signals: Customers who’ve been inside your UI for a while have calibrated their expectations to your design language. A checkout that looks like it belongs to a different product might make customers question whether they’ve ended up somewhere they didn’t intend to be.

• Branding consistency: Consistent branding across the purchase flow isn’t aesthetics for its own sake. It’s a signal that nothing unexpected is happening.

• Segment-specific configuration: A B2B platform collecting invoices from enterprise customers needs different fields and different payment methods than a consumer product. With embedded components, that’s configuration.

What are the risks and trade-offs of a heavily customized checkout?

Customization creates the need for maintenance, and that can create risks. Before you start overriding defaults, it’s worth knowing where things tend to go wrong.

Watch for:

• Component updates: Styling overrides and behavioral configurations can fail when you ship a component update or your design system changes. Providers can mitigate this by keeping overrides at the variable level, but custom rules targeting specific component states still need to be tested whenever a component structure is updated.

• Payment method suppression: Deprioritizing payment methods to keep the checkout clean can reduce conversion among users who prefer those methods. Make sure you have the data to justify removing any payment methods from view.

• Localization overrides: Setting a fixed locale because it matches your primary market means customers in other regions see labels and error messages in the wrong language. The default behavior is usually the right decision unless you have a specific reason to override it.

• Platformwide parity: If you’re running a platform where multiple businesses operate their checkouts through your product, every customization decision applies to all of them. A design that fits one business type might create a worse experience for another. Configuration options need to be offered to individual businesses on your platform rather than hardcoded for every business.

Is customizing your embedded payments checkout worth it?

Whether customizing embedded payments is worth it depends on what you’re customizing and why.

Consider the following:

• Styling to match your design system: This is often worth it. The implementation cost is low via Stripe’s Elements Appearance API, the maintenance burden is manageable, and the user experience benefit is significant.

• Payment method configuration based on your customer base: This is typically worth it if you have the data to support it. If, say, 80% of your users are in markets where certain payment methods dominate, configuring your checkout to reflect that is likely to improve conversion and reduce cognitive load.

• Suppressing fields to reduce form length: This is typically worth it when those fields are genuinely redundant. If your platform already collects a billing address earlier in the flow, removing it from the checkout flow is a win. If you’re removing it to make the form shorter without having already collected it, you’re creating a data gap.

• Deep custom flows: This is typically worth it if your product has a specific enough context to justify the complexity. A high-volume marketplace or a platform serving enterprise customers could benefit. A simple subscription product might not.

How Stripe Connect can help

Stripe Connect orchestrates money movement across multiple parties for software platforms and marketplaces. It offers quick onboarding, embedded components, global payouts, and more.

Connect can help you:

• Launch in weeks: Use Stripe-hosted or embedded functionality to go live faster, and avoid the up-front costs and development time usually required for payment facilitation.

• Manage payments at scale: Use tooling and services from Stripe so you don’t have to dedicate extra resources to margin reporting, tax forms, risk, global payment methods, or onboarding compliance.

• Grow globally: Help your users reach more customers worldwide with local payment methods and the ability to easily calculate sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and goods and services tax (GST).

• Build new lines of revenue: Optimize payment revenue by collecting fees on each transaction. Monetize Stripe’s capabilities by enabling in-person payments, instant payouts, sales tax collection, financing, expense cards, and more on your platform.

Learn more about Stripe Connect, or get started today.