Motivated by a desire to control their shopping experience, consumers have significantly shifted their activities to the digital space. Every digital touchpoint represents an aspect of the customer experience, and could potentially end a sales relationship with a single negative payment incident.
“Removing Friction at the Checkout: How Payment Experiences Influence Consumer Choice” analyzes the checkout processes of 510 leading merchants and the experiences of 2,139 adult consumers from a census-balanced survey to reveal that 60% of consumers are willing to switch to another merchant if they can’t pay with their preferred payment method. The lack of features is driving friction at checkout.
Read more: Q3 Online Checkout Friction Index: Lack of Payment Choice Drives Cart Abandonment
The study finds that consumers are spending a significantly longer time shopping before entering the checkout. The increased time spent on shopping and reaching the payment process suggests that consumers have less patience for friction at checkout in the future. As a result, limiting friction at checkout becomes an even more pressing matter for businesses to maintain customer loyalty and higher conversion rates.
As consumers strengthen and speed up their shopping behaviors, many top-performing businesses are regressing in maintaining a feature-rich customer experience. PYMNTS data shows that bottom- and middle-performing merchants narrowed the Index score gap between themselves and top-performing merchants by increasing the number of payment methods and offering better checkout features like a buy button, guarantee or refund, inventory status and live site help.
The report also discovers that 88% of online shoppers said they were “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their last online purchase experience. Security was a top concern for consumers, as 85.9% of shoppers reported that seeing a security logo during checkout made them feel more secure purchasing online. Furthermore, 81.6% of consumers are satisfied with their experience due to the ability to opt-in to marketing communications, such as notification of sales and discounts offers, solidifying the consumer-merchant relationship.
