84 Pct of SMB Customers Would Accept a Bit of Checkout Friction for Better Security

Trust and reputations take a lifetime to build, they say – but can be destroyed in mere seconds.

Consumers expect companies to protect their data. And they’re willing – in some cases – to accept a bit more friction at checkout to get assurance that their information is indeed kept safe.

In The Trust Quotient: How Merchant Trust Drives Shopping Behaviors, a PYMNTS and Sift collaboration, responses from more than 2,500 individuals revealed just how much trade-off certain demographics are willing to experience between convenience and security – and how much their decisions about shopping across various channels with various merchants is influenced by the trust factor.

See also: The Trust Quotient: How Merchant Trust Drives Shopping Behaviors

PYMNTS found that 84 percent of consumers shopping with smaller merchants for the first time want merchants to protect their data, even if it might mean adding friction to the checkout process.

The willingness to take the tradeoff is there, even when consumers may be shopping with larger, more familiar businesses – more than 79% said those companies should do “whatever it takes” to protect data.

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The tolerance level shifts a bit as demographics are taken into account. Baby boomers are the age group most willing to tolerate friction at checkout, with roughly 90 percent willing to do so across large or small – or familiar or unfamiliar – merchants. Millennials were the least likely to state that merchants should do anything necessary to protect data, at slightly more than two-thirds of that cohort, depending on the type of merchant and their familiarity with them.

Consumers who don’t worry as much about data protection, however, said they were less concerned, because they trusted the merchant or had good experiences with them. In other instances, a slim minority of respondents thought either the bank or the merchants themselves “would take care of problems.”

See also: The Trust Quotient: How Merchant Trust Drives Shopping Behaviors