According to a recent Stripe report, 58 percent of European payment flows contain at least three basic errors, resulting in unnecessary complexity for customers who thus risk abandoning their purchase right at the final stage, checkout, undoing any effort that has been made to increase conversion rates.
As we have also recounted here, in fact, among the most frequent reasons why an e-Shopper does not finalize a transition we find: a check-out process that is too long and complex (26 percent), an unreliable website to enter credit card data (17 percent) or insufficient payment options (6 percent).
Despite numerous efforts and investments by eCommerce companies to establish brand awareness, increase website traffic, optimize pages and convince customers to complete a purchase, a still surprising number of companies neglect precisely the final and crucial stage of the conversion path, namely the payment flow. This is a mistake that can cost very dearly if we consider that 90% of purchase abandonment cases in Europe occur precisely on the payment page and that it would therefore be good not to commit by following some simple tricks that we will see below.
The 3 most common mistakes during check-out
According to the analysis conducted by Stripe on 450 eCommerce players located in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Italy, in fact, there would be three most common mistakes:
1. Failure to automatically verify the card number during entry (42 percent of companies surveyed);
2. Absence of a numeric keypad to enter the card number on mobile devices;
3. Ability to complete the transition even if an incorrect card number or expiration date is entered (39% of cases).
The situation in Italy
Note of demerit for Italian eCommerce, which is found to be among the worst performing at check-out along with the Netherlands. In 66% of cases, in fact, the card type is not confirmed when the number is entered (the European percentage is 45%), while in 56% of cases the card number is not automatically verified (42% at the European level).
Another serious deficiency that is often found is the inability to insert spaces between numbers (19% of European cases, over 30% of Italian cases), thus creating the difficulty for the end user of having to use only a specific format for the data.
Difficulty that results in 21% of cases with abandonment of the purchase process and, consequently, a failure to convert, i.e., sell, for the eCommerce channel, since the process turns out to be too long or complicated for customers whose desire is to click the purchase button and complete the transition, without having to return to the form to correct basic errors.
How to fix problems at the checkout stage
Basic errors, then, that can – fortunately – be resolved by following a few simple steps:
1. Highlight any errors in the payment data in real time, so that the customer can correct the data immediately without getting to the end of the form first;
2. In case of an error, describe the error made to the customer as clearly, simply and specifically as possible, so that he can correct it without difficulty;
3. Make sure that the payment form accepts the information saved in the customer’s browser, so that he does not have to re-enter data he had already stored all over again each time, thus also speeding up the payment process;
4. Automatically show the card circuit icon after the number is entered;
5. Optimize the check-out phase for mobile devices as well (suffice it to say that although 50 percent of eCommerce-related traffic comes from smartphones, 88 percent of eCommerce sites surveyed do not support e-wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay).
GEL Proximity manages the relationships between the shopping cart and thousands of proximity logistics solutions for picking up a package or making a return, enabling an eCommerce to increase revenue by reducing the abandonment rate at check-out. To integrate GEL Proximity with just a few clicks, contact us now.
