Almost 40% of European customers said they had doubled or more than doubled their online shopping in the past year. However, some of the biggest ecommerce companies in Europe often overlooked one crucial step to making a sale: the checkout flow.
Recently, Stripe partnered with Edgar, Dunn & Company to analyse the top 800 ecommerce businesses across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, and found that 94% of checkouts had at least five basic errors.
Around 80% of those businesses supported neither Apple Pay nor Google Pay; 42% made at least three errors when formatting payment information or displaying error messages; and 75% did not allow customers to save their payment information for future use. Do you fall into one or more of these categories?
The most common errors
Some of the most common issues included poor card information formatting and error handling, not offering popular payment methods, and not allowing customers to save their payment method for future use. On their own, each of these issues may seem small. But, when combined, they add up to a needlessly difficult checkout experience for customers and lost sales.
21% of consumers would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to check out. Businesses can improve the checkout process by using descriptive error messaging, optimising for mobile, and localising the payments page. Best practices include:
- Highlighting payment information errors in real-time
- Using the customer’s billing address as the default shipping address
- Ensuring the payment form automatically resizes on smaller screens
- Localising the checkout experience by translating the page and displaying local currency
- Surfacing the right payment methods, depending on where your customers are located
- Letting customers check out as a guest
- Allowing customers to save their payment information
- And more
How Stripe can help
When optimising your checkout flow, you could try to prevent issues on your own and divert development resources to focus solely on your checkout experience. Or, you could leverage an optimised, hosted payments page like Stripe Checkout.
Stripe Checkout was designed with conversion best practices in mind, allowing businesses of all sizes to design seamless checkout flows that are optimised for mobile and cater to an international audience. It combines all of Stripe’s frontend, design, and analytics expertise to offer a seamless payments experience, allowing you to integrate in minutes to securely accept payments.
If you would like to build your own custom checkout form, you can use Stripe Elements, a set of rich, prebuilt UI components. Like Stripe Checkout, Stripe Elements also offers mobile optimisation, real-time validation, autofill, localisation, and frontend formatting.
For more information, take a look at Stripe Checkout and Stripe Elements and streamline the sales experience for your customers. Get started today.
