Introduction
96% of the top North American eCommerce businesses we analyzed had at least five basic errors in their checkout, adding unnecessary friction for customers.
Forty-one percent of North American customers we surveyed said they have doubled or more than doubled their online shopping in the past year. While this increase in demand presents a huge opportunity for online businesses in North America, it also puts more pressure on companies to successfully capitalize on this potential and offer the best customer experience. However, we found that some of the biggest eCommerce companies in the United States and Canada often overlook one crucial step to making a sale: the checkout flow.
Elastic Path Payments is built in partnership with Stripe. Stripe and Edgar, Dunn & Company analyzed the top 200 eCommerce businesses in the United States and Canada and found that 96% had at least five basic errors. Some of the most common issues include poor card information formatting and error handling, not offering popular payment methods, and not allowing customers to save their payment method for future use. On their own, these issues may seem small. But, when combined, they add up to a needlessly difficult checkout experience for customers and lost sales.
This report analyzes the checkout flows of the top eCommerce businesses in North America and details the most common checkout errors, categorized into four sections:
- Checkout form design
- Mobile optimization
- Localization
- Buyer trust and security
The report also explores why these checkout issues matter, how to prevent them from happening in your ecommerce checkout flow, and how Elastic Path Payments, powered by Stripe, can help.
1. Checkout Form Design
Customers expect a fast, intuitive ecommerce payment experience, with 19% of consumers saying they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to checkout. However, it takes 56% of customers, on average, more than three minutes to complete a purchase and 17% blame a long and complicated checkout experience as the reason for abandoning an order in the past year.
The highest performing checkouts are made up of dozens of small optimizations executed seamlessly. For example, displaying descriptive error messaging when customers enter the wrong payment information, supporting address auto-complete, and allowing customers to save their payment information for future use. In a separate Stripe study, we found that offering address auto-complete can increase conversion by close to 0.8%, and using specific error messaging can increase retry rates following a decline by as much as 3.5% (for example, changing the message from “your card was declined” to “your card was declined. Try a different card”). These increases may seem small, but they can quickly add up—especially for eCommerce businesses with high transaction volume.
The Top Payment Form Errors
- 42% of top businesses made at least three mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages; these mistakes include not alerting customers when they entered an invalid card number or tried to pay with an expired card
- 51% did not support address auto complete
- 36% did not format card numbers in blocks of four digits for easier data entry
- 77% did not allow customers to save their payment information for future use
Checklist: How to Design an Optimized Checkout Form
2. Mobile Optimization
Fifty percent of customers we surveyed said they do more than half of their shopping from a mobile device, with 62% saying it’s “very” or “extremely” important for a website to be mobile friendly. If your ecommerce checkout flow isn’t tailored to a smaller screen—for example, if the checkout page doesn’t automatically adjust to the size of the device—customers are more likely to abandon the checkout flow completely. In fact, while more than 50% of eCommerce traffic comes from smartphones, carts are abandoned on mobile at more than twice the rate of desktop.
Supporting digital wallets, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, can help expedite the shopping experience on mobile. A separate Stripe analysis found that close to 37% of American consumers and 34% of Canadian consumers have either Apple Pay or Google Pay enabled on their device, creating the opportunity for businesses to offer a one-click payment experience that, on average, is three times faster than having to manually enter payment details.
The Top Three Mobile Optimization Errors
- 76% of checkouts we analyzed did not support Apple Pay
- 88% of checkouts did not support Google Pay
- 13% failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile
Penetration of Digital Wallets
Checklist: How to Optimize for Mobile
3. Localization
North American businesses need to support a local experience for their international shoppers, like adapting the payment methods they offer to their customer’s location. While cards are the predominant online payment method in the US and Canada, 40% of consumers outside the US prefer to use a different payment method. For example, bank transfers are the most popular payment method in Germany, and almost one-third of Italian customers prefer to pay with a digital wallet.
Local Payment Methods Among Top European eCommerce Businesses
When we looked at the top North American eCommerce businesses with a presence in multiple markets, the number of payment methods they offered did not increase. Instead, they successfully adapted their payment methods on a per-country basis to optimize for local conversion. For example, the same North American eCommerce business would offer Giropay for German customers, iDEAL for Dutch customers, and Przelewy24 for Polish customers.
We’ve seen the impact that local payment methods can have on checkout conversion. In a separate Stripe study, we analyzed the impact of accepting popular European payment methods for Austrian, Belgian, German, Dutch, and Polish shoppers. By enabling these methods, businesses saw a 40% incremental increase in sales, and transaction fees were reduced by 0.4 percentage points (while these cost savings may sound small, they can quickly add up).
Impact of accepting popular European payment methods on sales in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Belgium.
We estimated the increase in net-new sales that could result from adopting a local payment method. We first predicted a business’s sales volume if they had never adopted that payment method. Then, we analyzed the difference between actual sales volume and our predicted volume.
Supporting the right payment methods doesn’t only apply when expanding internationally; it can also be a way to offer your customers extra flexibility and convenience, especially for larger purchases. For example, buy now, pay later services let customers immediately finance purchases and pay them back in fixed installments over time, and can result in an increase in sales.
Buy now, pay later payment methods
Checklist: How to Localize Your Checkout Experience
4. Buyer Trust and Security
North American customers said a “secure” website had one of the biggest impacts on a “positive” shopping experience. However, going through additional security steps after customers confirm an order adds extra friction and negatively impacts their experience.
Many North American customers may not be familiar with additional ecommerce security layers such as 3D Secure, which have been mandatory for European merchants but also lead to additional friction in the payment flow. To streamline the checkout experience and prevent illegitimate payments, it’s important for North American businesses to invest in robust fraud monitoring that can work in the background to detect and block fraud.
eCommerce businesses can promote buyer trust and security during the account creation process prior to checkout. For example, allow customers to check out as a guest, reducing the amount of personal information you collect and store. If you do require customers to log in to complete a purchase, give customers the ability to connect to their existing social media accounts. This keeps their personal information stored in the social media profile, rather than on your website, and helps expedite the checkout process.
The Top Three Buyer Trust and Security Errors
- 18% of checkouts did not allow customers to checkout as a guest
- 90% did not allow customers to create an account by connecting to a social media profile
- 22% did not display an order summary that could be easily adjusted
Checklist: How to Increase Buyer Trust
Checkout Best Practices for Global Subscription Businesses
An increasing number of companies are turning toward subscription models as they offer the ability to create a reliable revenue stream. In addition, consumers have grown accustomed to signing up for digital subscriptions, with our survey showing that, on average, North American consumers pay for 2.5 active subscriptions.
Like ecommerce companies that process one-time payments, subscription businesses should prioritize the same checkout optimizations we’ve covered: form design, mobile, localization, and buyer trust and security. However, there are additional optimization opportunities that are unique to subscription businesses.
The Top Three Checkout Best Practices for Subscription Business
- 44% offered a free trial
- 53% let customers enter a coupon code directly on the checkout page
- 16% offered reusable payment wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay
How Elastic Path Can Help
Our analysis shows that basic checkout issues are widespread, even among the top companies in North America that likely have dedicated teams focused on conversion rates.
When optimizing your checkout flow, you could try to prevent issues on your own or divert development resources to focus solely on your checkout experience. Or, you can leverage an optimized payment integration like Elastic Path Payments.
Benefits of Elastic Path Payments include 30% higher checkout completion rates, increased payment acceptance, and lower fraudulent transaction rates. Elastic Path Payments addresses every stage of the checkout process, ensuring brands are ready for success. Features include:
- Seamless online checkout: Offer a checkout experience in 25+ languages, 135+ currencies, and dynamically show the payment methods most likely to improve conversion. Provide up to a 46% increase in sales after enabling local payment methods.
- Fraud management: Increase top-line revenue with decreased false positives on credible transactions. Every year, businesses lose an estimated 3% of their revenue due to false declines.
- Network-wide acceptance: Avoid declines due to network issues or unrecognized cards with automated re-tries and credentials updates.
- Powering global brands: Offer payment acceptance in 185 countries and 135+ currencies.
- Best-in-class security: Compliance with the most current standards, including PCI DSS Level 1, PSD2 (EU), and SCA.
- Unified reporting: Centralized dashboard for real-time metrics reporting.
- Payment methods for all business models: Subscriptions support, Alternative Payment Methods (wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.), Buy Now Pay Later payment methods, POS machines, and more.
See how easy it is to configure EP Payments:
Thinking about re-evaluating your checkout experience? Reach out now to learn how we can partner with you to help you create a seamless checkout experience for your customers, increase revenue and achieve your digital commerce goals.
Methodology
Stripe partnered with Edgar, Dunn & Company to select the top 100 ecommerce websites (for a total of 200) in the United States and Canada based on online sales volume from Statista. Adult entertainment platforms or online gambling websites were not included in the analysis. After determining the relevant websites, each one was tested for pre-defined errors by placing a product in the shopping cart to simulate an online purchase and, in some cases, using a VPN to complete the checkout process to mimic customers based in different countries. Checkouts were tested for a total of 26 criteria related to checkout form design, mobile optimization, localization, and buyer trust and security.
Stripe also analyzed the top 200 global subscription companies based on online website traffic from Crunchbase, focusing on B2C subscription websites offering digital content.
Lastly, Stripe surveyed 200 consumers in North America to uncover insights around current shopping behaviors and trends, payment preferences, and factors that affect the checkout experience..