lululemon Adds Shop Pay to Checkout as It Fights to Turn Around Slipping Digital Sales

Nick Engel, lululemon's SVP of global digital experience, framed the addition around removing friction at the final step of a purchase. He said Shop Pay creates "the kind of checkout where hundreds of small details come together into something that just works," and that bringing it to lululemon.com "takes one more step out of the path to getting what they came for" [1].

Lauren Nemeth, Shopify's VP of global enterprise, said lululemon "sets the bar for brand experience, and checkout is one of the most important moments in the online purchase process" [1].

Interim co-CEO Andre Maestrini told investors the company is focused on driving conversion through its ecommerce sites, pointing to a redesigned homepage and category pages, with product detail pages next [2]. Shop Pay arrives as a further step in that same conversion push, applied specifically to the checkout flow itself.

Lululemon's chief financial officer at the time, Meghan Frank, said the digital channel "increased 13% and contributed $1.1 billion of top line or 42% of total revenue" in fiscal Q3 2025 [4]. A quarter later, digital sales growth accelerated to 9% [3]. By fiscal Q2 2026, that momentum had reversed.

The historical performance data Shopify has disclosed supports that logic. When Shop Pay expanded outside Shopify's own checkout to Facebook and Instagram, the company told TechCrunch that more than 40 million buyers already used Shop Pay regularly across its merchants, with $20 billion in cumulative GMV processed since its 2017 launch [5].

That distinction matters for any enterprise buyer weighing a similar move. Checkout wallets like Shop Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and Google Pay increasingly compete for placement as modular payment methods rather than full-platform bets. They let a retailer test a specific friction point, the moment of payment, without committing to a broader migration.

For a brand the size of lululemon, with ecommerce contributing 39% of revenue in its most recent quarter [2], that kind of narrowly scoped change is lower risk than a platform swap, while still targeting the part of the funnel where carts are most often lost.

For other retailers watching the move, the relevant takeaway is not the specific vendor but the sequencing: diagnose where digital revenue is slipping, treat checkout as a distinct, measurable layer, and add a targeted fix there before touching the rest of the stack. Lululemon's recent quarters show how quickly that revenue line can swing in either direction, and why checkout has become the place retailers look first.