94% of leading ecommerce sites making five or more basic errors in their checkouts.

The vast majority of Singapore’s top 100 ecommerce websites (94%) had five or more errors on their checkout pages.

This is according to the payments platform Stripe, which reviewed 500 top e-commerce websites across Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.

Merchants are failing the two-minute-check out test

According to data shared by Stripe, Singaporean consumers expect a fast, intuitive and mobile optimised payment experience, with as much as 44% saying they would abandon a purchase if it took more than two minutes to check out.

Merchants are failing this two-minute-test, with almost half (47%) of consumers saying that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase. As a result, more than a quarter (28%) online shoppers abandoned a purchase in the past year because of a long and complicated checkout process, the payments company said in a statement.

No support for Apple Pay and Google Pay

Some of the most common errors include not supporting digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, not offering a numerical keypad for entering card numbers on mobile devices, and allowing transactions to be submitted with incorrect card numbers or expiry dates, said Stripe.

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, especially as more commerce moves online.

Friction-ridden checkouts

Some of the most common errors being made at the checkout page were those which create unnecessary friction for users:

  • 74% didn’t allow customers to save their payment information for future use.
  • 54% of checkouts didn’t display an error message in real-time when an invalid card number was entered.
  • 49% didn’t show an error message in real-time when an expired card was used to make payment.
  • 57% didn’t support address auto-complete.

Not optimised for mobile

Half of consumers (52%) say they do most of their shopping from a mobile device; where merchants face a higher risk of cart abandonment that is more than twice the rate of those shopping on desktop computers. So building a successful checkout for the small screen is crucial, but many of the 100 sites reviewed offered poor mobile experiences: 

  • A vast majority did not support global digital wallets Apple Pay (87%) and Google Pay (89%)
  • 28% didn’t offer a “guest checkout experience” – 19% said they’d abandon their cart if forced to create an account at checkout.
  • 8% failed to surface a numeric keypad to enter card information on mobile

Poor practices for subscriptions

Subscription businesses are on the rise, with Stripe’s findings revealing that, on average, consumers in Singapore pay for two active subscriptions. To win subscribers, merchants could do better:

  • 56% of checkouts did not offer a free trial.
  • 53% did not offer reusable payment methods, such as wallets or direct debit.
  • 47% did not let customers enter a coupon code directly on the checkout page.

Low buyer trust and security

A secure website was one of the top two reasons consumers attributed to a positive shopping experience, with 11% saying they have abandoned a website in the past year because it didn’t seem secure. Paradoxically, going through additional security steps after customers confirm an order adds extra friction and negatively impacts their experience. Businesses have to strike the right balance and avoid common buyer trust and security errors: 

  • 73% of checkouts didn’t allow customers to create an account by connecting to a social media profile.
  • 28% didn’t offer a guest checkout experience.
  • 24% didn’t display an order summary that could be easily adjusted.

Payment options not localised

While debit and credit cards are still the dominant online payment method among Singaporean consumers, accounting for 74% of payments, digital wallets will soon be the “new normal” and are poised to overtake credit cards—becoming the most popular payment method by 2024. Also, 88% of Singaporean online businesses sell internationally. Therefore, offering popular noncard payment methods and ensuring a localised checkout experience (by translating the checkout page based on country and displaying local currency) can significantly increase conversion rates and reduce costs.

The best checkouts focused less on the number of payment methods supported and more on offering the right combination of payment options. The majority of ecommerce websites typically offered a total of four payment methods in addition to credit cards. For top ecommerce 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 ecommerce business would offer GrabPay and DBS PayLah for Singaporean customers, and Afterpay and ZIP Pay for Australian customers.

Offering the right local payment options helps increase revenue. A separate Stripe study found that businesses saw a 27% increase in sales when they offered Afterpay, a popular buy now, pay later payment method in Australia and New Zealand. With Alipay, a popular payment method in China, businesses saw a two-fold increase in sales from Chinese consumers.