Europe’s Top Websites Making Basic Checkout Errors

Stripe, which builds economic infrastructure for the internet, has conducted a detailed review of the 800 top websites across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and The Netherlands, uncovering significant errors in the checkout pages of many of the world’s most visited websites. The vast majority of sites (94%) had five or more errors on their checkout pages.

European consumers expect a fast, intuitive payment experience, with 21% saying they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to check out. Merchants are failing this one-minute-test, with 44% of consumers saying that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase. As a result, nearly one-in five (17%) online shoppers abandoned a purchase in the past year because of a long checkout process.

Some of the most common errors include not supporting digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, not offering a numerical keypad for entering card numbers on mobile devices, and allowing transactions to be submitted with incorrect card numbers or expiry dates.

With 68% of all online shopping carts being abandoned, fixing basic checkout page errors and removing all possible friction in the transaction process can yield big upticks in sales, especially as more commerce moves online.

Friction ridden checkouts

Some of the most common errors being made are those which create unnecessary friction for users:

• 42% of companies made at least three mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages—these mistakes include not alerting customers when they entered an invalid card number or tried to pay with an expired card
• 61% didn’t support address auto-complete and 9% supported neither address auto-complete nor native auto-fill
• 10% of checkouts didn’t default to letting customers use their billing address as their shipping address
• 75% didn’t allow customers to save their payment information for future use

Not optimised for mobile

Over a third (37%) of consumers say they do most of their shopping from a mobile device, so building a successful checkout for the small screen is crucial, but many of the 800 sites reviewed by Stripe offered poor mobile experiences:

• 89% of checkouts we analysed did not support Apple Pay
• 85% of checkouts did not support Google Pay
• 20% failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile

European sales are being left on the table

Many of Europe’s top ecommerce sites are not providing a simple checkout for users in other European countries, resulting in lost revenue, with 17% of consumers saying they abandoned a purchase in the last year because their preferred payment method wasn’t available. Businesses should adapt the payment methods they offer to their customer’s location.

The challenges are similar in the UK as across Europe – with 89% of Britain’s top ecommerce sites having five or more errors on their checkout pages. 18% of UK consumers say they would abandon a purchase if it took more than one minute to check out, and concerningly for UK businesses, 33% of consumers said that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase.

Max Roberts, Regional Leader UK, Middle East & Africa at Stripe said: “The smallest glitches in a checkout page can create significant lost revenues, and so even the world’s most successful ecommerce sites struggle to perfect their checkouts. Bringing together a simple payments form, surfacing the right payment options for each individual consumer, and making the whole experience mobile friendly, takes a lot of focus and near constant adaptation.”