Checkout button copy: “Check out” vs “Submit my order”

TL;DR

• On a supplement funnel’s checkout page, Stefan Georgi tested four button labels. “Check out” won: 37.5% of checkout visitors converted, vs 28% for “Submit my order”¹².
• Revenue per checkout visitor rose from $34 to $46 (+33%). At 1,000 checkout visitors a day, that ~$12 difference works out to about $4.38M a year³⁴.
• The likely reason: “check out” is the shopper’s own word. “Submit” is ambiguous (“submit what?”). Every bit of friction removed on the checkout page adds sales².
• Small copy changes at high-traffic steps are worth testing. A headline change for a dog-harness brand lifted conversion ~10%, from about 1,000 to 1,100 sales a day⁵.

Details

Test. Run in 2020 on a supplement offer Stefan (Stefan Georgi) was partnered on with operator Cody Bramlett. The data covered 685 checkout conversions. Only the button text changed¹².

Button text	Checkout conversion
Submit my order (control)	28%
Check out	37.5%
Pay now	36%
Complete my purchase	21%

Stefan describes this as about a 30% improvement, based on the split of traffic and 198 sales. He says “Pay now” and “Complete purchase” also brought more revenue than the control. His slide shows that, though “Complete purchase” had the lower conversion rate²³.

Revenue per visitor vs AOV. He measured average revenue per checkout visitor (including people who didn’t buy), not AOV. That metric is the one that captures upsell and bundle effects as well as conversion³.

Why it matters. People mock “button colour” CRO, but checkout is the last step of every path in the funnel (Choosing the funnel path — ad, advertorial, VSL, product page, checkout), where people enter card details and commit. Gains there multiply across all traffic².

How to apply:

1. Use the verb your buyers already use on that step (“Check out”, “Pay now”) and avoid vague labels (“Submit”, “Continue”).
2. Make the label match what happens next. If the button skips the cart, say so (The product-page buy box).
3. Judge on revenue per checkout visitor, with enough conversions (he had 685).

Disagreements / caveats

• This is one funnel from 2020, presented in a video promoting Stefan’s freeadcopy.com. The other eight tests from the same talk are behind that tool. He says it “wouldn’t change” in 2024, which is plausible but untested here.
• The $4.38M figure is an extrapolation (1,000 checkout visitors/day × $12 × 365), not booked revenue.
• The conversion rates as stated (28% → 37.5%) imply a ~34% relative lift. Stefan rounds it to “30%” without exact per-arm counts.

See also

• The product-page buy box — CTA design on the product page
• Paywall CTA and microcopy that converts — the same question on app paywalls
• Web paywall and checkout best practices for web2app — web checkout for subscriptions

Footnotes

1. Changing the Checkout Button Added $4,380,000 in Revenue to My Biz @ 00:00 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩²

2. Changing the Checkout Button Added $4,380,000 in Revenue to My Biz @ 01:38 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Changing the Checkout Button Added $4,380,000 in Revenue to My Biz @ 04:43 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Changing the Checkout Button Added $4,380,000 in Revenue to My Biz @ 06:16 — Stefan Georgi ↩

5. Changing the Checkout Button Added $4,380,000 in Revenue to My Biz @ 03:10 — Stefan Georgi ↩