Despite the fast-paced growth in online retail sales, checkout conversions and cart abandonment are still a huge problem for many retailers—particularly on mobile, where conversion rates are around half of those on desktop.
While consumers spend more than half their time on mobile devices, the channel only accounts of 20 percent of all dollars spent.
The e-commerce journey isn’t just about getting shoppers to the payment page; it’s about engaging them in the entire process—across multiple channels—so that when they reach checkout, they’ll actually want to convert. According to the PYMNTS.com January 2018 Checkout Conversion Index, the average time to check out on websites is 2.65 minutes.
The same study indicates that $200 billion in sales are lost each year due to friction in the checkout process, which is roughly a 50 percent abandonment rate.
Of the shoppers who abandon their carts, one in four customers, or 28 percent, indicate a long or complicated checkout process as a reason they didn’t complete the purchases.
This falls second only to high costs (which deter 60 percent of those who abandon their carts) and having to create an account at checkout as the primary reasons users abandon their purchases.
One way to reduce those pain points is by innovating at the point of sale.
Traditional legacy systems are clunky, difficult to upgrade, have out-of-date security features, and can’t keep up at the rate a digitally focused economy demands. Savvy shoppers will take note of retailers with inconvenient checkout options or those that don’t offer flexible and alternative payment methods, so it’s crucial for e-commerce retailers to adopt new technological innovations that align with consumer expectations and needs.
