PayPal and Visa move to streamline the checkout

Online shopping might be booming but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a frustrating experience on many sites. Problems with poor UX, fiddly forms to fill in and crowded screens that already existed on the web are only accentuated on smaller mobile screens as consumers increasingly shift their spending to smartphones and tablets.

Cart abandonment, where shoppers get part of the way through making a payment for an online service or goods and then walk away from it, is still a massive issue. Salecycle reckons more than 70% of orders across 500 global brands were abandoned in Q3 in retail, fashion and travel – a percentage that highlights a massive sales opportunity loss for merchants and big demand for better check-out tools.

 

Streamlining

Mobile World Congress saw a number of payments giants flexing their muscle in the space, with PayPal announcing that it’s rolling out its One Touch checkout tool to another 120 markets, making it available in a total of 143. Launched 10 months ago, the firm claims to be processing “millions” of transactions through the tool each day. It says 18m customers have opted in to the service, with 20% joining in the past month.

Meanwhile, Visa is also expanding the reach of its Checkout tool to new markets in France, India, Ireland, Poland, Spain and the UK taking its total acceptance to 22 markets by the end of the year. Launched in 2014, Visa claims the service is used by 11m consumer accounts and is accepted by 25,000 merchants. It also announced integration with biometric authentication at the conference. Other new features include card scanning and autofill at sign up and options for merchants to personalise their checkouts.

 

Competition

It’s not just incumbents in this space, with Klarna in Europe one of the new entrants making waves in the e-commerce tech space. Klarna lets shoppers buy goods without needing to enter their payment details on the spot – they can choose to pay within 14 days or on the spot. The company says 50,000 sites have “benefited” from the service, including a coup on the shape of hyped US shopping newcomer Wish.

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