Ninety-four percent of Singapore’s top 100 e-commerce websites have five or more errors on their checkout pages, reveals a study by online payment processing company Stripe.
Some of the most common errors were those that create unnecessary friction for users.
This includes not allowing customers to save their payment information for future use (74%), not supporting address auto-complete (57%), and failing to display an error message in real-time when an invalid card number was entered (54%) or an expired card was used (49%).
Besides that, many of the local e-commerce sites Stripe reviewed did not optimise their checkout for mobile. More than half (52%) of Singaporean consumers say they mostly shop from their mobile device but most sites offered poor mobile experiences.
Nearly nine in ten did not support global digital wallets such as Apple Pay (87%) and Google Pay (89%). Over a quarter (28%) did not offer a “guest checkout experience”, which is important as 19% of consumers will abandon their cart if forced to create an account at checkout. Some sites also failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile.
Additionally, Singaporean e-commerce players that sell internationally should focus less on the number of payment methods supported and more on offering the right combination of payment options.
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The majority of e-commerce websites typically offered a total of four payment methods in addition to credit cards. For top e-commerce businesses with a presence in multiple markets, the number of payment methods offered did not increase.
Instead, they successfully adapted their payment methods on a per-country basis to optimise for local conversion. For example, the same e-commerce business would offer GrabPay and DBS PayLah for Singaporean customers, and Afterpay and ZIP Pay for Australian customers.
With eight out of ten lost sales failing on the checkout page, fixing basic checkout page errors and removing all possible friction in the transaction process can yield big upticks in sales.
This is exemplified by Flower Chimp, a regional online flower delivery company in Southeast Asia. By simplifying its checkout process and enhancing the security around payments with Stripe, Flower Chimp saw its overall purchase conversion rate increase from 2.5% to 8%, including a 37% boost to its mobile checkout conversion rate.
“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,” says Paul Harapin, head of Revenue & Growth for Asia Pacific & Japan at Stripe.
He continues: “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. We’ve built Stripe Checkout so you don’t have to.”
Photo: Unsplash
