Key Checkout Features Separate Best From The Rest In eCommerce

eCommerce was the name of the game for consumers and retailers in 2020, with merchants’ success hinging on the power of rapid innovations and intuitive responses to consumers’ demands. Customers and retailers alike faced numerous challenges last year, however, ranging from intermittent lockdowns to economic uncertainty.

Merchants saw catastrophic losses mount earlier in the year but came roaring back in the fourth quarter after a 49 percent increase in sales during the holiday season, buoyed also by eCommerce’s 15 percent share of total sales in Q3. Retailers and consumers in general also benefited from an industrywide initiative to remove frictions from online sales experiences, from onboarding to shopping cart editing to checkout.

But in a crowded online field of retailers, which features are proving especially useful in helping merchants turn browsing shoppers into paying customers?

PYMNTS’ Checkout Conversion Index: Q4 2020 Edition examines eTailers’ marked shifts toward implementing key features that enabled innovations in consumers’ experiences. The Index gauges the online and mobile checkout performances of a random sample of more than 650 merchants that represent 70 percent of non-Amazon sales online in Q4. It focuses specifically on 78 indicators to measure how retailers’ customer experiences affected their conversion rates.

Some of the biggest improvements have been made by the smallest merchants. These retailers typically have the most to gain by implementing key features that smooth their checkout processes, but they must also put in the most effort to meet consumers’ standards. Merchants with the highest Index scores — those whose customers experienced the least friction at checkout — maintained incremental improvements over their results in Q4 2019.

As checkout performance gaps shrank between the top 30 and bottom 30 merchants, digital wallet adoption and free shipping emerged as powerful determinants of positive customer experiences. All top merchants offered free shipping, for example, while retailers at the bottom of the list increased their adoption by 17 percentage points.

There is a deeper story behind these numbers, however. Consumers’ expectations drove even the smallest merchants to innovate as a matter of pure survival. They succeeded in improving with significant help. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms simplified checkout innovations for smaller merchants, for example, allowing them to rapidly boost their checkout performances.

These findings merely scratch the surface of PYMNTS’ research in the Checkout Conversion Index: Q4 2020 Edition. For more insights into the checkout innovations that are helping merchants survive and even thrive during the pandemic, download the report.