Consumers Are Flocking to E-Commerce, But They’re Hitting Too Many Brick Walls, Stripe Says

Despite consumers’ expectation that checkout during an e-commerce purchase should be fast and instinctive, most online merchants still have checkout procedures that add unnecessary friction, says a survey from online-payments powerhouse Stripe Inc.

The report, released Tuesday, reveals that 96% of 200 North American e-commerce merchants surveyed had committed at least five basic errors in their checkout process. Some 56% of customers took more than three minutes to complete a purchase, Stripe says. When errors occur that complicate and extend checkout, consumers are more likely to abandon a purchase if it takes more than a minute. During the past year, 17% of consumers that abandoned their shopping cart cited a lengthy and complicated checkout process as the reason, says Stripe. 

“The user experience for online shoppers has not included the essential optimizations that create a high-performing (and high-converting) checkout experience,” Josh Ackerman, senior product manager for Stripe, says by email. “There are dozens of optimizations that can make it seamless for consumers to complete the checkout process.”

Ways e-commerce merchants can streamline checkout include displaying descriptive error messages when inaccurate payment details are entered and auto-completing addresses. “Merchants have also seen the massive benefits of saving consumers’ payment-instrument details for future use,” Ackerman adds.

One of the most common mistakes at checkout is having a poorly designed payment form into which consumers enter their card data, as well as shipping and home addresses.

Of the merchants surveyed, 42% made at least three mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages. Mistakes include not alerting customers when they entered an invalid card number or tried to pay with an expired card. In addition, 51% did not support address auto-complete, 

36% did not format card numbers in blocks of four digits for easier data entry, and 77% did not allow customers to save their payment information for future use. 

A prominent factor behind the mistakes and omissions is that e-commerce merchants tend to focus nearly all of their time and resources on servicing customers, as opposed to the checkout experience. “At the end of the day, many businesses simply don’t have the resources to spin up an optimized, end-to-end user-checkout experience,” Ackerman adds. 

As an example, an e-commerce site that adjusts the display of content to the screen size of the device is critical. Indeed, 62% of consumers surveyed by Stripe say it’s “very” or “extremely” important for a Web site to be mobile friendly, as half of those respondents say they do more than 50% of their shopping from a mobile device. 

When a checkout page doesn’t automatically adjust content to the size of the device, consumers are more likely to abandon their shopping cart. Cart abandonment among mobile shoppers when content is not properly formatted to the device is more than twice that of shoppers using a desktop computer, the report says.  

Supporting digital wallets, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, can create an opportunity for e-commerce merchants to offer a one-click payment process that, on average, is three times faster than manually entering payment information, according to the report. Overall, 76% of e-commerce merchants did not support Apple Pay and 88% did not support Google Pay. 

“It’s clear more and more consumers strongly prefer making purchases via mobile. But merchant adoption of essential payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay are significantly below what you may expect,” Ackerman says. “Oftentimes, this is either because the merchant isn’t aware of just how much of their business is driven by mobile traffic, or they’ve yet to make the investment to enable Apple Pay and Google Pay within their checkout flows.”

That being the case, one design feature that can significantly enhance checkout on a mobile device is to display a numeric keypad at checkout for entering credit card numbers or expiration dates, Ackerman says.