Stripe has conducted a detailed review of the 800 top websites across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and The Netherlands, uncovering significant errors in the checkout pages of many of the world’s most visited websites. The vast majority of sites (94 per cent) had five or more errors on their checkout pages.
European consumers expect a fast, intuitive payment experience, with 21 per cent saying they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to check out. Merchants are failing this one-minute test, with 44 per cent of consumers saying that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase. As a result, nearly one-in-five (17 per cent) online shoppers abandoned a purchase in the past year because of a long checkout process.
Some of the most common errors include not supporting digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, not offering a numerical keypad for entering card numbers on mobile devices, and allowing transactions to be submitted with incorrect card numbers or expiry dates.
With 68 per cent of all online shopping carts being abandoned, fixing basic checkout page errors and removing all possible friction in the transaction process can yield big upticks in sales, especially as more commerce moves online.
Friction ridden checkouts
Some of the most common errors being made are those which create unnecessary friction for users:
- 42 per cent of companies 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
- 61 per cent didn’t support address auto-complete and 9% supported neither address auto-complete nor native auto-fill
- 10 per cent of checkouts didn’t default to letting customers use their billing address as their shipping address
- 75 per cent didn’t allow customers to save their payment information for future use
Not optimised for mobile
Over a third (37 per cent) of consumers say they do most of their shopping from a mobile device, so building a successful checkout for the small screen is crucial, but many of the 800 sites reviewed by Stripe offered poor mobile experiences:
- 89 per cent of checkouts we analysed did not support Apple Pay
- 85 per cent of checkouts did not support Google Pay
- 20 per cent failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile
European sales are being left on the table
Many of Europe’s top eCommerce sites are not providing a simple checkout for users in other European countries, resulting in lost revenue, with 17 per cent of consumers saying they abandoned a purchase in the last year because their preferred payment method wasn’t available. Businesses should adapt the payment methods they offer to their customer’s location.
The challenges are similar in the UK as across Europe – with 89 per cent of Britain’s top eCommerce sites having five or more errors on their checkout pages. 18 per cent of UK consumers say they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to check out, and concerningly for UK businesses, 33 per cent of consumers said that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase.
Max Roberts, Regional Leader UK, Middle East & Africa at Stripe said: “The smallest glitches in a checkout page can create significant lost revenues, and so even the world’s most successful eCommerce sites struggle to perfect their checkouts. Bringing together a simple payments form, surfacing the right payment options for each individual consumer, and making the whole experience mobile friendly, takes a lot of focus and near constant adaptation.”
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