How to optimise your checkout flow and increase revenue

Our data shows that 91% of the top 800 ecommerce websites in Europe make at least five basic checkout errors, creating unnecessary friction for customers. Furthermore, the top 200+ global B2C subscription sites struggle with transactional errors.

In this report, we’ll cover:
  • Checkout conversion strategies
  • Payment method preferences
  • Mobile optimisation
  • Subscription best practices

The state of European checkouts

10 min. read
12 pages

Did you know?

Sixty-two percent of customers give up on a purchase when the checkout process takes more than 2 minutes, yet the average time to complete a checkout in Europe is 3.3 minutes. Providing a fast and intuitive checkout experience is essential for reducing cart abandonment and increasing sales.
Of the ecommerce businesses we surveyed:

64%

of ecommerce sites didn’t provide the ability to save payment information for future purchases via one-click checkout.

63%

didn’t offer buy now, pay later services.

89%

didn’t support Apple Pay while 86% did not support Google Pay.

51%

didn’t recommend related products or services through cross-selling.

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Key insights

Checkout best practices

Optimising the checkout flow, following mobile best practices, and identifying and accommodating customers’ payment method preferences are crucial for conversion. We found that 95% of customers said it was important for a website to provide the common payment methods in their country, and 86% would frequently abandon their cart if their preferred payment method wasn’t available.

Best practices include:

  • Highlighting payment information errors in real time
  • Ensuring your payments form automatically resizes to smaller screens
  • Localising the checkout experience with page translations and local currencies
  • Surfacing the right payment methods depending on customer location
  • Allowing customers to save their payment information
  • Offering buy now, pay later services, especially for high average order values
  • Providing free trials for subscriptions

Ready to get started? Try it out or get in touch.

Stripe Checkout supports 35+ languages and 135+ currencies and dynamically shows the payment methods most likely to improve conversion.
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