All E-commerce merchants fear the dreaded checkout abandonment exit by their online shoppers—and with good reason—as many retail websites can be a seemingly endless exercise in clicking. According to the following article, when merchants make the payment transaction part of their online purchase process, rather than an add-on, good things will happen.
Transactions are the foundation of business, but too often in our line of work we see payments treated as an afterthought.
As a consumer, we’ve all gone through an online checkout only to find they don’t take our card or our preferred mobile wallet, spotted a product online and struggled to find a place we can buy it, had to leave an app, or, worse still, download one to buy something, or landed on a confusing looking checkout page that looks completely different to the rest of the website.
About 69 per cent of all online transactions are abandoned. Business Insider calculates that this costs retailers around $4 trillion a year. Imagine if that was a physical store. One hundred people walk in, fill their baskets, walk up to the check out, and then 69 of them just leave.
Now in all fairness, a large portion of cart abandonments are simply a natural consequence of how users browse e-commerce sites — many users will be window shopping, comparing prices, saving items for later, exploring gift options, etc. This is largely unavoidable. However, a substantial portion of these could be converted into a sale through a better experience. Baynard Institute has suggested that around 35 percent are convertable — just by improving the checkout and payment process.
These changes include things like a shorter and clearer checkout, surfacing the relevant payment options that people want to use so they can choose the one they want, and stronger security. Research shows that around 42 percent of millennials currently limit their own mobile transactions because of security concerns. It’s clear that cracking online and mobile payments is a huge priority to improve business sales, however it has an impact beyond conversion too.
Lost sales through checkout abandonment becomes even more problematic for mobile shopping. Maneuvering through pages on a smartphone screen and using the keypad is not exactly effortless. On demand services for ride sharing, as well as mobile order and pay, have proven that embedding payments in the purchase process ensures a smooth and completed transaction.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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