Merchants Turn to Smart Checkout Offers to Lift Conversion
Checkout is evolving from a payment endpoint into a critical marketing channel for retailers and restaurants. Merchants can use discounts, add-on offers and loyalty incentives when customers are closest to completing a purchase, potentially lifting conversion and order value. The challenge is to make those promotions relevant without eroding margins, while ensuring the cost of integrating customer, transaction and inventory data produces a measurable return.
A recent merchant survey found that real-time promotions embedded at checkout have become the most commonly used promotional channel. Yet only 27% of merchants can deliver individualized offers in real time, highlighting a wide gap between broad discounting and true one-to-one personalization. Limited access to usable data and the difficulty of connecting systems are driving demand for smarter checkout tools that can balance conversion gains, margin controls and return on investment.
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The history behind this eventMerchants Chase $349 Billion Smart Checkout Opportunity
Checkout has long been treated as the end of a transaction, while promotions rely on coupon codes, paper vouchers, loyalty accounts or marketing messages shoppers may never see. Smart checkout turns that moment into a sales channel by evaluating basket and payment data in real time, then automatically identifying and applying product-level discounts, loyalty rewards and brand-funded incentives. For merchants, the shift could reduce redemption friction, lift basket values and make promotional spending easier to measure.
PYMNTS Intelligence, working with FIS, published its latest findings on July 28, 2026, based on a survey of 60 merchants spanning grocery, retail, eCommerce, restaurants and food services. The research estimates that $349 billion in consumer spending could move through smarter checkout experiences. It found that 73% of merchants use targeted offers, but only 48% rank them as their most successful promotional tool, highlighting the gap that automatic, real-time offer application could address. Restaurants showed the strongest interest in investing in the technology.
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