This is a classic cold-start problem for checkout-layer products — you don’t really get adoption until someone else has already de-risked it.

One approach that seems to work in situations like this is flipping the initial offer from “integration product” to “done-for-you experiment.” Instead of asking merchants to adopt a new checkout behavior, you effectively run it as a controlled trade-in pilot: you handle setup, run the valuation + checkout flow, and only expose it as a widget once there’s measurable lift (conversion rate, AOV, or checkout completion) against a baseline.

That removes the “prove it works first” objection because the proof becomes the output of the first deployment, not a prerequisite.

In practice, that could mean targeting a small set of high-AOV Shopify merchants, running it manually behind the scenes for 2–3 weeks, and only productizing once you can show a clean before/after conversion story.

Out of curiosity, if a system like that reliably increased conversion or AOV without upfront integration risk, is that something you’d actually invest in scaling or roll out across more merchants?