60% of APAC Online Shoppers Bail at Checkout Without Local Payments Options

The Asia-Pacific region is poised to become a major area of growth for U.S. and U.K. merchants in the next three years, especially for specialty eTailers like Victoria’s Secret , Adidas and Sephora , which focus on a specific retail sector.

And omnichannel retailers, direct-to-consumer (D2C) merchants, and online marketplaces are not far behind in terms of their own APAC ambitions.

“ The Emerging APAC Opportunity ,” a PYMNTS and Citcon collaboration based on surveys of 500 business leaders across the U.S., U.K. and Canada, found a key to success in the APAC region is localized payments, particularly digital wallets.

Only 1.8% of U.S., U.K. and Canadian firms grasp that APAC customers want to use local digital wallets when shopping on their sites, but with the APAC region and China specifically having reopened after pandemic lockdowns, the press is on for APAC.

“Localized payment options are particularly critical to reaching APAC customers,” the study stated. “PYMNTS’ data finds that 41% of the businesses that sell to APAC customers without providing localized payment options say their cart abandonment rates exceed 60%. Among merchants selling in the APAC region that provide local payment methods, only 32% experience cart abandonment rates that high.”

Examining the levels of interest that various types of online sellers have in optimizing APAC as a market showed “specialty eTailers and omnichannel retailers exhibit the strongest presence within or interest in expanding into the APAC market of any type of business in our study,” as 27% of omnichannel retailers already sell to consumers in APAC, leading all types of merchants.

Another 11% “plan to sell in APAC in the next year,” the study found. “Meanwhile, 23% of specialty eTailers already sell to APAC customers, and 17% plan to sell to the region in the next year. This means that these retailers potentially have the most to gain from localizing their payments.”