Shopify Updates

Shopify Recommended Checkout Field Settings: What to Accept

Last verified: September 7, 2026, against the Shopify changelog and the Shopify Help Center.

Since August 13, 2026, eligible Shopify stores see a banner on the Checkout settings page recommending three changes to the customer information fields: contact method set to email only, first and last name required, and shipping phone number optional. Nothing changes until you click apply. Accept the first two on most stores. Accept the third unless a courier needs the number, in which case keep it required and say why on the form.

By Misha Gavura · 15 min read · Every quote and figure on this page was read off a live page on September 7, 2026, and the source is named next to it.

What Shopify is recommending, and where to find it

The whole announcement is four sentences on Shopify's changelog, dated August 13, 2026, under the title "Recommended changes to checkout field settings are now available." Here it is in full, because the exact wording matters for what follows:

"Eligible stores can now get personalized recommendations for customer information settings from the Checkout settings page in Shopify admin. These recommendations help you collect more complete customer details at checkout so you can reconnect with past shoppers more effectively and personalize your marketing. New stores already use these recommended settings by default. Recommendations may include setting customer contact method to email-only, requiring first and last name, or optionally collecting shipping address phone number. You can review recommendations and apply any changes directly from Checkout settings. Existing store settings won't change unless you apply the recommendations."

Three things to take from that. First, the path: Settings > Checkout, the same page where the customer information fields have always lived. Second, the stated purpose is not conversion. Shopify says the point is to "collect more complete customer details" so you can "reconnect with past shoppers" and "personalize your marketing." That is a retention argument, and it is an honest one; it is also why this page exists, because the changelog says nothing about what the changes do to the order you are trying to win right now. Third, nothing happens on its own. "Existing store settings won't change unless you apply the recommendations."

Shopify calls the recommendations "personalized" and says they "may include" the three changes, which reads as: you see a line only where your current setting differs from the recommended one. The word "eligible" is not defined in the post or on any Help Center page I could find on September 7, 2026. If you do not see the banner, that is the most likely reason.

Every customer information field you can change

Before judging the three recommendations it helps to see the full menu, because Shopify only recommends on three of six settings. Every label in this table is quoted from the Help Center's "Checkout form options" page as it read on September 7, 2026. That page also says, of everything not listed here, "All other form options are always required."

Two notes from the same page. Changes can take up to 30 seconds to show on a live checkout, so do not panic-refresh. And the shipping phone field only appears when there is a shipping step, so an order of non-physical products shows no phone field whatever you set.

One more setting sits on the same admin page and is worth separating out because it also uses the word "recommended." Under the email marketing opt-in, Shopify lets you preselect the consent checkbox by region, and one of the two choices is "Regions recommended by Shopify." That controls where a marketing checkbox is ticked in advance; it has nothing to do with which fields the form asks for. The Help Center adds, verbatim, "Automated email marketing consent settings aren't a substitute for legal advice."

Recommendation 1: contact method, email only

What it changes on the form

The first field of Shopify checkout is the contact field. With "Phone number or email" selected it accepts either, and a shopper who types a mobile number can complete the whole order without ever giving you an email address. With "Email" selected it accepts only an email address. The shipping phone number is a separate field later in the form; this setting only governs the contact field at the top.

The case for accepting

A phone-only order is a customer you cannot email. No receipt, no shipping confirmation, no abandoned-checkout email if they stall, and no address for the list you spend money building. Shopify's changelog frames it exactly this way: "collect more complete customer details" so you can "reconnect with past shoppers." Every recovery flow and post-purchase sequence you run depends on having the email, so the value of this change is the value of those flows on the orders that currently arrive without one.

There is a smaller argument too. Baymard Institute found "the average checkout flow in 2024 is 5.1 steps long and contains 11.3 form fields" while "most sites need only 8 form fields in total," and that "17% of users have abandoned due to checkout complexity." Email only does not remove a field, but it removes a choice, and choices are what Baymard's testers stumble on.

The case against

Some shoppers prefer phone. If mobile-first buyers in your market routinely check out with a number, or your retention runs on SMS, forcing an email address on the very first field of checkout is real friction. The mechanism is the one Baymard documents for phone fields below: asking for contact data the shopper did not want to give.

Neither Shopify nor Baymard publishes a conversion figure for email-only versus phone-or-email, and I am not going to invent one. What you can do is measure your own exposure: export your last 90 days of orders and count the ones with a phone number and no email. Close to zero, and email only costs you nothing. A visible share, and you have a segment to protect and a test to run.

Who should accept it, and who should not

• Accept: most D2C stores; any store running abandoned-checkout emails, email receipts, or a paid email list; any store where phone-only orders are rare in the export above.
• Hold and test: stores with a measurable share of phone-only orders; stores whose retention runs on SMS and who are content to collect the number in the shipping step instead.
• Either way: if you switch, also confirm your SMS marketing opt-in is still collecting numbers in the shipping section, because the contact field will no longer supply them.

Recommendation 2: require first and last name

What it changes on the form

The Help Center's two options are "Only require last name" and "Require first and last name." With the first, the first-name field still appears on the shipping address but is not mandatory; a shopper can leave it blank and continue. With the second, both fields must be filled. Shopify recommends the second.

The case for accepting

Almost every store should already be here. A parcel label reading only "Gavura" is harder for a carrier to deliver to a shared address and harder for you to match to a customer record, and a first name is what you greet people with in every email afterwards. The friction is one field most shoppers fill without noticing, because every other checkout asks for it. Against Baymard's 11.3-field average, a first-name field is not what pushes a checkout over the line.

The case against

Every required field is a place a shopper can stop. If you sell purely digital goods, have used last-name-only for years, and personalize nothing, there is no operational reason to add one. That is a narrow group. For everyone else the argument against is theoretical, and the argument for is a carrier finding the door.

Who should accept it, and who should not

• Accept: any store shipping physical goods; any store with customer accounts, loyalty, or personalized email.
• Hold and test: digital-only or service stores already on last-name-only with no delivery problem to solve.

Recommendation 3: shipping phone number, optional

What it changes on the form

This is the one with the most evidence behind it, and the one where the right answer depends most on how you ship. The Help Center lists three options for the shipping address phone number: "Don't include," "Optional," and "Required," and notes that Optional is the default. Shopify's recommendation is "optionally collecting shipping address phone number," which means the banner is aimed at stores that have moved off the default in either direction.

The evidence

Baymard Institute has studied the phone field specifically. Its article on explaining the phone field, updated July 29, 2025, reports that "14% of online shoppers are reluctant to provide their phone number" and that "39% of sites in our benchmark require a phone number without any explanation." Baymard's testers were observed abandoning checkout entirely when made to hand over a number with no reason given. The same article gives the fix: if you must require it, explain next to the field why you need it.

Put that next to Baymard's wider abandonment data, which lists "too long / complicated checkout process" as the reason given by 17% of shoppers who abandoned during checkout, and a required phone field with no explanation is a textbook example of the thing shoppers say they leave over. It is also the cheapest of the three recommendations to reverse: one dropdown, no redesign.

The case for keeping it required

Some carriers need a number. Courier and same-day services, furniture and freight deliveries, and any delivery where the driver has to reach the customer at the door all run on phone contact, and a failed delivery costs you far more than the friction of a field. Baymard's research is not an argument against collecting a number in those cases; it is an argument against collecting it silently. Keep the field required, and put one plain sentence beside it: "Your courier will call before delivery."

The case against "Don't include"

The other direction is removing the field entirely for a shorter form. The cost shows up later: a delivery exception with no way to reach the customer, and no number for SMS opt-in either. Optional gives the shopper the choice and gives you the number from those who do not mind, which on Baymard's figure is most of them.

Who should accept it, and who should not

• Accept (move to Optional): stores on "Required" that ship by post or standard parcel and never actually call; stores on "Don't include" whose carrier ever needs a number.
• Do not accept: courier, same-day, furniture, freight, and local-delivery sellers. Stay on Required and explain the field on the form.
• SMS-dependent stores: Optional still collects the number from willing shoppers; the marketing opt-in checkbox is a separate setting on the same page and keeps working.

The decision table

The three recommendations, who should take each one, and the order to test them in if you would rather not take Shopify's word for it.

How to test a field change honestly

Every one of these changes is small, which is exactly why they are easy to fool yourself about. A checkout conversion rate moves week to week on its own, and flipping a dropdown on a Tuesday and looking at Friday's number tells you nothing. Two methods work; one of them is only available if a condition holds.

Method 1: a Rollouts experiment, if your fields live in the configuration

Shopify Rollouts, under Markets in the admin, can split traffic between two versions of your checkout. The Help Center's rollout-types page lists "Replace your checkout and accounts configuration" as a change type, its requirements page says "Experiments are available to stores on the Grow plan or higher," and the same page limits it: "Rollouts support only online store checkouts. Headless and custom storefront checkouts aren't supported and can't be tested with rollouts." We covered the whole feature in Shopify Rollouts A/B testing.

Here is the part I could not confirm, and will not pretend to. None of the Help Center pages I read on September 7, 2026 say whether the Customer information fields are part of the configuration a rollout replaces, or store-wide settings outside it. The configurations page says Basic, Grow, and Advanced stores "can have up to 20 draft configurations" and that "You can have only 1 active configuration at a time that has real customer traffic," but it never lists what a configuration contains. So open your checkout and accounts editor, click the Settings sidebar, and look. If the customer information options are there, duplicate the configuration, change one field, and run it as a Rollouts experiment with a start date, an end date, and a percentage below 100. If they are not, use Method 2.

Method 2: before and after, with the sample size decided first

A before-and-after comparison is weaker than a split, because the weeks differ, but it is honest if you set the rules in advance and refuse to peek. The rules:

1. Pick one metric. Checkout completion: orders divided by sessions that reached checkout. Not store-wide conversion, which moves for a hundred other reasons.
2. Change one setting. Not all three at once. If you accept all three and conversion moves, you will not know which one did it.
3. Decide the sample size before you start. Use the statistical significance calculator with your baseline checkout completion rate and the smallest change you would act on. As an illustration, and this is my arithmetic on the standard two-proportion formula rather than a published figure: detecting a move from 50% to 52.5% completion at 95% confidence and 80% power needs roughly 6,300 checkout sessions in each period. Smaller stores will need weeks, and should know that before they begin.
4. Run whole weeks. At least two full weeks each side, so weekday and weekend shoppers are in both, and no sale or launch in either.
5. Read the result once. When both periods have reached the sample, compare them. If the interval on the difference spans zero, you have not learned which setting is better, and the retention argument decides it.

For the email-only change, track a second number alongside completion: the share of orders arriving with an email address. That is the metric Shopify is actually recommending on, and it moves immediately. The discipline of tests that refuse to call early winners is laid out in honest A/B testing.

The other August change: last-used payment method

Eight days after the field recommendations, on August 21, 2026, Shopify's changelog posted a second checkout change, titled "Checkout now defaults to last used payment method for signed-in customers." The post is two sentences:

"Checkout now remembers a signed-in customer's last-used payment method and pre-selects it on future purchases. This feature is only enabled for checkout flows where saved payment methods are enabled on D2C and B2B."

There is nothing to accept or decline. It is live behavior, and it applies only where the customer is signed in and saved payment methods are enabled on that checkout. A guest sees no change. A signed-in customer with a saved method sees the one they used last time already selected, instead of whatever your checkout showed first.

The conversion logic is the same one behind every accelerated checkout: a returning buyer who has to make one fewer choice is more likely to finish. Shopify's own Shop Pay page claims "As much as 50% better conversion compared to guest checkout" and that Shop Pay "outpaces other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%," with the footnote "Based on an external study completed with a Big Three global management consulting firm in April 2023." That is Shopify's number about Shop Pay, not about this change, and I quote it only to show the direction Shopify is pushing: fewer decisions for a known buyer.

One thing to check on your own store. If you ordered your payment methods so a particular one appears first, say an installment option you promote, returning signed-in customers who last paid another way will no longer see it preselected. The same applies on B2B checkouts. Not a reason to worry, but a reason to look at your payment-method mix by customer type in a month and see whether it moved.

What new stores get by default

The August 13 changelog says it in one line: "New stores already use these recommended settings by default." Read with the Help Center's option list, that means a store created after the change starts with contact method set to "Email," full name set to "Require first and last name," and shipping address phone number set to "Optional." The Help Center already described Optional as the default for the phone field; the other two are the new part.

For an older store, this tells you where Shopify thinks the baseline is now, not that the baseline is right for you; Shopify itself calls the recommendations "personalized" and leaves the choice with you. For a new store where one of the exceptions above applies, a courier who needs a number for instance, change the default. Nothing is locked.

The verdict

Accept email only and first-and-last-name on almost every store; they cost one choice and one field, and they buy you the email address every recovery flow you run depends on. Take the shipping phone recommendation only as far as your carrier lets you: Optional if nobody ever calls the customer, Required with a one-line reason if someone does. Test rather than accept only where you have a measurable segment to protect, and if you test, change one setting, set the sample size first, and do not read the result until you get there.

None of this is where the big money in checkout is. Baymard's abandonment list puts extra costs at 40% and slow delivery at 20% of checkout abandonments, far ahead of the 17% for a long or complicated form, and Shopify's own checkout optimization article, dated August 19, 2026, leads with guest checkout, express payment, and showing costs early. If your checkout completion rate is the problem, start with reducing cart abandonment on Shopify, and with the checkout customization deadline we covered in Shopify checkout extensibility. The field settings are a fifteen-minute job. Do it, then move on to the things that move the number.

Disclosure. We are building StorePilot, a CRO tool for Shopify. It is not on the Shopify App Store and cannot be installed on a live store yet, so this page has nothing to sell you. The settings above are Shopify's own, free, and take a few minutes to change.

Questions merchants keep asking

What are Shopify's recommended checkout field settings?

Three changes to the Customer information section of Settings > Checkout. Shopify's changelog post of August 13, 2026 says the recommendations "may include setting customer contact method to email-only, requiring first and last name, or optionally collecting shipping address phone number." They appear as personalized recommendations for eligible stores, and Shopify says new stores already use these settings by default.

Where do I find the recommended changes in Shopify checkout settings?

From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout. The changelog says eligible stores "can now get personalized recommendations for customer information settings from the Checkout settings page in Shopify admin" and that "you can review recommendations and apply any changes directly from Checkout settings." If you do not see a recommendation, your store is either not yet eligible or already matches the recommended settings.

Do I have to accept Shopify's recommended checkout changes?

No. The changelog is explicit: "Existing store settings won't change unless you apply the recommendations." The banner is a suggestion, not a scheduled change. You can apply one recommendation and ignore the others, or ignore all three.

Should I switch Shopify checkout to email only?

For most stores, yes. With "Phone number or email" a shopper can complete an order having given you only a phone number: no email receipt, no abandoned-checkout email, no address for your list. Email only closes that hole. The exception is a store where a meaningful share of orders already arrive with a phone number and no email; export your orders and count before you switch.

Does requiring a phone number at checkout hurt conversion?

Baymard Institute's research says 14% of online shoppers are reluctant to provide their phone number, and 39% of sites in its benchmark require a phone number without any explanation. Its testers saw some users abandon checkout entirely when forced to give a number with no reason shown. The safe reading is that a required phone field with no explanation costs you some orders, an optional field costs you very little, and a required field with a one-line reason next to it sits somewhere in between. Baymard does not publish a percentage lift for removing the field.

Should I require first and last name at Shopify checkout?

If you ship physical goods, almost certainly. A parcel addressed to a surname alone is harder for a carrier to deliver and harder for you to match to a customer record, and the cost is one field most shoppers fill without thinking. If you sell only digital products and have used "Only require last name" for years without a problem, there is less reason to change, and you can test it.

What checkout fields can I change in Shopify?

Per the Help Center page on checkout form options, read September 7, 2026: customer contact method ("Phone number or email" or "Email"), full name ("Only require last name" or "Require first and last name"), company name ("Don't include", "Optional", "Required"), company VAT number ("Don't include", "Optional"), address line 2 ("Don't include", "Optional", "Required") and shipping address phone number ("Don't include", "Optional", "Required"). The same page says "All other form options are always required."

What does "Regions recommended by Shopify" mean in checkout settings?

It is a different recommendation from the field settings, and easy to confuse with them. It lives under the email marketing opt-in setting and controls in which regions the marketing consent checkbox is preselected. Shopify's Help Center describes it as automatically aligning with local law, and adds that "Automated email marketing consent settings aren't a substitute for legal advice." It has nothing to do with which fields your checkout asks for.

Can I A/B test Shopify checkout field settings?

Possibly, through Rollouts. The Help Center says a rollout can replace "your checkout and accounts configuration" and that experiments "are available to stores on the Grow plan or higher." What the Help Center pages I read do not say is whether the Customer information fields are part of the configuration a rollout swaps. Open your checkout and accounts editor, look in the Settings sidebar, and if the fields are there you can run a real split test. If they are not, run a before-and-after comparison with a fixed sample size decided in advance.

What changed with Shopify checkout payment methods in August 2026?

On August 21, 2026 Shopify's changelog announced that "Checkout now remembers a signed-in customer's last-used payment method and pre-selects it on future purchases." It applies only "for checkout flows where saved payment methods are enabled on D2C and B2B." There is nothing to accept; it is live behavior for signed-in customers with a saved payment method.

Sources, all read September 7, 2026

• Shopify changelog, August 13, 2026: Recommended changes to checkout field settings are now available
• Shopify changelog, August 21, 2026: Checkout now defaults to last used payment method for signed-in customers
• Shopify Help Center: Checkout form options (every option label quoted above)
• Shopify Help Center: Address collection preferences
• Shopify Help Center: Collecting customer contact information ("Regions recommended by Shopify")
• Shopify Help Center: Rollouts, including the requirements-and-considerations and rollout-types pages
• Shopify Help Center: Active and draft checkout configurations
• Baymard Institute: Checkout flow form fields (June 26, 2024) and Explain why you need a phone number (updated July 29, 2025)
• Baymard Institute: Cart abandonment rate statistics (reasons for abandonment)
• Shopify: Ecommerce checkout optimization (August 19, 2026) and Shop Pay (conversion claim and footnote)

Where this page says a fact could not be confirmed, the pages above were read and the fact was not on them. The one sample-size figure in the testing section is my own arithmetic and is labelled as such. Shopify changes admin wording without notice; re-check before you rely on a quote.