Addressing the Current Challenges in eCommerce Checkout Experience
2020 was the year of many things, direct-to-consumer commerce among them. The first wave of lockdowns saw a huge increase in eCommerce sales, as even traditionally offline businesses were forced to start offering their wares using online payments. This trend towards more digital shopping is likely permanent, as we just had the busiest Black Friday ever — with the number of online customers growing by 22% compared to 2019.
While this sounds like good news for eCommerce stores, there remain some major challenges that hinder the online checkout experience.
Current Challenges in eCommerce Payments
Businesses running D2C or eCommerce stores are well aware of the major issues in customer checkout experience. High rates of fraud and chargebacks make online commerce much more costly for businesses. This has gotten worse since the pandemic, with a 31% increase in chargebacks since March 2020.
According to LexisNexis’ 2020 True Cost of Fraud Report, the cost of fraud has risen 7.3% across US retailers and e-commerce merchants. Every $1 of fraud now costs them $3.36 compared to $3.13 in 2019.
Meanwhile, low checkout conversion and high cart abandonment rates show there’s massive missed revenue opportunities. While eCommerce cart abandonment rates have never been good in recent years, they now are worse for the majority of industries in 2020:
Increased fraud, chargebacks, high cart abandonment and low conversion rates are all consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and poor checkout experiences. One thing is clear, eCommerce and D2C businesses need to make some changes in order to minimize these issues and succeed long term.
What’s the Solution?
There are many tools and technologies businesses can invest in to start tackling these checkout experience issues. There are numerous fraud prevention tools that also help reduce chargebacks and false positives for eCommerce sellers. However businesses need to be careful when using these kinds of tools. More than half of merchants report that their fraud prevention solution auto declines up to 7.5% of all their transactions, even legitimate ones.
Fraud prevention tools also don’t solve the whole problem. They don’t do anything to improve customer experience and reduce abandoned shopping carts.
There are many solutions out there that use email marketing and exit surveys to try to recover abandoned carts, such as CartStack, Rejoiner, and Qualaroo. But why not address the problem at its source to prevent abandoned carts instead of recovering them?
According to research by the Baymard Institute, people leave their carts during checkout for a number of reasons:
Having to create an account and the checkout process being too long/complicated account for 49% of responses. 17% abandoned the cart as they were hesitant in using their credit card on the site. This is a huge optimization opportunity if eCommerce sellers can just simplify the checkout process.
Furthermore, introducing additional payment methods, like Open Banking Payments, reduces cart abandonment helping capture the business of those who marked there weren’t enough payment methods available as their reason for dropping off.
What About a Holistic Approach?
There are lots of solutions popping up to help address checkout experience issues, but the truth is these problems are multifaceted for merchants. Businesses want to address fraud, minimize chargebacks and improve checkout experience simultaneously, not individually. That’s possible with a comprehensive solution like Trustly.
Trustly uses Open Banking Payments to process transactions, which utilizes the ACH Network to provide an affordable way to improve customer authentication and guarantee payments. This process significantly reduces the risk of fraud and effectively eliminates chargebacks.
Regular card-not-present transactions have to be approved and authorized by the merchant, gateway, acquirer, card network, and issuing bank, lowering approval rates in the process. With Open Banking Payments, transactions stay between the merchant, Trusty’s authentication system, and the bank, which streamlines approvals and improves customer experience for shoppers.
When you use Trusly’s Open Banking Payments, there’s no need for customers to go through lengthy forms to create an account with your website; information is pre-populated for them from their online banking accounts. The checkout process is simplified by requiring only their bank log-in information. This can significantly improve checkout conversion rates, customer experience, and reduce abandoned shopping carts overall.
Introducing Open Banking Payments for an eCommerce business is far from reinventing the wheel. Collaborating with an implementation team like Trustly’s streamlines the process and minimizes necessary time investment, no matter if you’re running multiple online checkout experiences. Virtual Gaming Worlds, one Trustly client, was able to go live with Open Banking Payments across 3 online properties in just 7 days. Soon after, they started enjoying comparable approval rates, lower cost of acceptance than cards, and zero chargebacks.
It’s Time to Be Proactive
With the recent massive growth in online shopping, businesses are struggling to keep up with the challenges: fraud, chargebacks, and poor customer experience. Instead of being reactive to these issues and looking for one-off solutions to each problem, why not invest in technology that tackles everything from the source?
Checkout process without and with Trustly:
Trustly's Open Banking Payments solution offers a huge advantage over traditional ACH or credit card methods, while including features that help minimize costs and maximize revenue potential from online shopping transactions.
If you would like to see how Trustly could help your business accept Open Banking Payments, request a meeting with our sales team.
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