At a glance
Order-count split by payment gateway used at checkout. Reads which gateways customers actually picked, in what proportion. The single best diagnostic for fee optimisation, dispute exposure, and Shop Pay adoption.
Calculation
Worked example
A UK DTC apparel brand on Shopify (Advanced plan), Shopify Payments enabled, PayPal Express on, Klarna on for orders over £80. Reporting period: 12 Apr 26 to 11 May 26.
Five things to notice:
- Shopify Payments at 70.4% is healthy for UK Advanced plan stores. Industry benchmark is 65 to 78% on Advanced; 80%+ usually means PayPal isn’t enabled or Shop Pay opt-in is forced. Below 60% suggests checkout friction (PayPal opt-out hidden, Shop Pay button slow to render). The fee implications matter: every order on
shopify_paymentssaves the 0.5% non-Shopify-Payments tariff Shopify levies on competing gateways. - PayPal at 16.7% is structural, not retrievable. PayPal-preferring shoppers are demographically older and mobile-skewed; trying to push them to Shop Pay typically loses the order rather than converting the gateway. Don’t treat PayPal share as a target to reduce, treat it as a captured-segment metric to maintain.
- Klarna’s high AOV (£142 vs £68 baseline) is the lever. Klarna users spend 2x the average order. The card surfaces this as a count, but the implication is in the value card. Showing Klarna eligibility earlier in the funnel (PDP, not just at checkout) typically lifts overall AOV by 5 to 12% on stores with significant Klarna share.
- The
gift_card4.1% is dual-tender. Most of those 280 orders also paid the balance via Shop Pay or PayPal, so they’re double-counted in the table. The card shows behaviour (“did the customer use a gift card at all?”), not exclusive choice. Stores aggressively running gift-card promos see this share rise mechanically. - The
bogus15 are noise. A QA agency or dev partner running checkout regression tests; should not be treated as production volume. Stores with very highboguscounts (>1%) usually have a misconfigured test gateway live in production, fix before reading any other gateway split.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Payment Methods on its own is a snapshot. Pair with these for the full picture:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Shopify Admin:Analytics → Reports → “Sales by payment method”The closest twin in Shopify Admin. Shows revenue per gateway (not just count); set the date range to match this card’s window and the proportions should align order-for-order. Other Shopify Admin views that look similar but are not the same:
- Settings → Payments: lists the gateways enabled on the store, not their actual usage. Useful for confirming what the customer was offered, not what they picked.
- Finances → Payouts: Shopify Payments payouts only. Does not include PayPal, Klarna, or external gateways. Useful for cash flow, not gateway share.
- Orders → All orders → filter by Payment status: an order-level view; reconstructs gateway split by manually counting tagged orders.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does the chart show more counts than I have orders? Multi-tender orders. An order paid with a gift card and a credit card contributes once togift_card and once to shopify_payments. The total of all gateway slices can exceed your order count by 5 to 15% on stores with active gift-card programs. This is the right behaviour, the card answers “which gateways did customers actually engage with?”, not “what was the dominant gateway per order?”.
Where is Shop Pay in this list?
Inside shopify_payments. Shop Pay is an accelerated checkout flow that uses Shopify Payments under the hood; orders pay through shopify_payments regardless of whether the customer clicked the Shop Pay button or filled the regular form. To split Shop Pay specifically, look at the checkoutToken.experience field (Plus only) or use Shopify’s Shop Pay analytics report under Apps.
Why is my Apple Pay / Google Pay share so low (or zero)?
Same reason: those wallets generally route through shopify_payments and don’t get their own gateway label. If you’re seeing dedicated apple_pay rows, you’re routing Apple Pay through an external gateway (rare in modern setups). For most merchants, “Apple Pay used %” lives inside the Shop Pay metric, accessible through the Shop Pay analytics app, not this card.
Should I push customers off PayPal toward Shop Pay?
Generally no. PayPal users self-select; pushing them off usually loses the order, not converts the gateway. The correct read of this card is gateway availability health (is each enabled gateway converting at expected share?) not gateway forced-substitution. The exception is when fees materially differ; on small stores under £200K/year revenue, PayPal’s flat fee can be 30 to 50 basis points more expensive than Shop Pay, in which case promoting Shop Pay (without removing PayPal) is the right move.
What does manual mean?
A merchant-recorded payment that didn’t go through an automated gateway. Common cases: cash on delivery, bank transfer, B2B invoice payment marked paid in admin. Most stores see <1% manual share unless they actively offer those terms (B2B Edition, India COD, EU bank-transfer-friendly categories).
Does this card include subscription billings?
Yes, every Shopify Subscriptions billing creates a new order with its own paymentGatewayNames. The customer’s saved card pays via whichever gateway tokenised the payment method (almost always shopify_payments). Subscription-heavy stores typically show 80%+ Shopify Payments share because the recurring base reuses the same tokenised payment.
Multi-currency stores, does the card aggregate or split by currency?
Aggregates. The card is gateway-by-count across all currencies. To see per-currency gateway share (e.g. “Klarna’s share of EUR-denominated orders only”), use Ask Viq with a currency filter.
Shopify Plus vs basic plan, behavioural differences?
Plus stores can run custom JavaScript in checkout (Checkout Extensions, Shop Functions) which sometimes injects custom gateway slugs. Plus stores using B2B Edition see b2b_credit_terms or similar custom labels. Basic plan stores see only the standard set: shopify_payments, paypal, gift_card, manual, bogus, plus whichever third-party gateways the merchant explicitly enabled.
My PayPal share dropped from 18% to 4% overnight, what happened?
Three usual causes: (1) PayPal’s risk engine started declining your traffic (an account-health issue requiring a PayPal review), (2) PayPal Express button stopped rendering on the page (a checkout-app conflict; check the live page in incognito), or (3) the customer journey changed (you launched Shop Pay first-touch and customers now click that before scrolling to PayPal). Pull Checkout Failure Rate split by gateway to disambiguate. If failures spiked at the same time, it’s (1); if failures held but share collapsed, it’s (2) or (3).
Refresh cadence?
Webhook-driven, 5 to 15 minute index lag. The current-day chart fills in throughout the day.
B2B vs DTC, how does the gateway split differ?
Dramatically. B2B orders often use manual (invoice-pay), b2b_credit_terms, or wire-transfer custom gateways. DTC is dominated by Shopify Payments + PayPal + BNPL. A blended store shows a hybrid that doesn’t represent either segment cleanly; segment by purchasing-entity type for any decision based on this card.
Action playbook when a major gateway share drops:
- Check the gateway’s status page first. Stripe / PayPal / Klarna outages are public and short-lived; the card recovers automatically.
- Test the live checkout in incognito. Confirm each gateway button still renders. Apps (loyalty, upsell, fraud) sometimes break checkout buttons silently after an update.
- Look at Checkout Failure Rate split by gateway. A spike in declines on one gateway is a fraud-rule or 3DS-config issue.
- Review recent gateway-config changes (Settings → Payments). A merchant turning on 3DS aggressive mode or Klarna eligibility floors silently shifts share.
- If nothing on your side changed, contact the gateway. PayPal especially can change risk thresholds without notice and starve your traffic for 24 to 72 hours.