Did you know the average e-commerce shopping cart abandonment rate is somewhere between 60% and 80%? That is to say, 60% to 80% of the time someone puts merchandise into a shopping cart while shopping online, they do not complete the transaction. Imagine if that happened at a regular brick and mortar store?
A Techradar article published last Friday caught my attention. The article, Many UK online stores plagued by payment issues, cited a recent study conducted by Stripe that looked at the websites of many of its UK customers. In the study, Stripe looked at the checkout pages of 450 of the leading e-commerce sites in Europe. What the company found was many of these sites were falling short of maximizing the checkout experience.
Alarmingly, the research found that one in three (32%) of the busiest UK e-commerce outlets were allowing customers to submit transactions with invalid card numbers. A further four in five (82%) of big online retailers still don’t offer Apple Pay or Google Pay to customers in the UK.
Allowing customers to submit invalid card numbers? Really? That seems like such a fundamental part of checkout process.
Stripe goes on to mention that only 12% of the European websites it reviewed allowed shoppers in other countries to utilize local payment schemes. Also, many did not offer multilingual options for cross-border shoppers.
The article goes on to mention:
Simple warnings, such as failure to warn shoppers when out of date expiry information was entered, or the lack of a numerical keyboard option being available for entering card numbers on a mobile, were seen as obstacles for consumers wanting to buy goods. In fact, many websites were not even optimised for mobile use.
I feel like one of the primary goals of e-commerce is to make the user experience (UX) of the checkout page as accommodating to the shopper as possible. Logic dictates that a seamless checkout experience reduces the aforementioned astronomical abandonment rates.
Managing a checkout page is a combination of science and art dedicated to improving UX and reducing abandonment. Some of the mistakes highlighted in this article seem so simple that there isn’t a lot of science or art required.
Overview by Peter Reville, Director, Primary Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
