Checkout is where buying intent either becomes an order or quietly disappears. A compilation of 50 cart-abandonment studies calculated a 70.22% average. Our cross-border payment research recommends testing a concise default payment-method view, local ordering, clear labels, and local-currency display.
What this guide covers
- How to reduce friction before the buyer reaches the payment step
- How to use three to five relevant payment options as an initial checkout configuration
- How geo-IP ordering, visual trust labels, and local-currency display can reduce payment-choice friction
- Why market share data alone leads to the wrong checkout placement decisions
- How to evaluate checkout placement using selection, submission, completion, and authorization data, rather than authorization rate alone
Reduce friction before the payment step
Not every checkout exit happens at the payment step. Buyers also leave before they ever see a payment method, so treat pre-payment friction and payment-option display as separate problems:
- if a buyer leaves before choosing a method, check the items below;
- if the buyer sees the methods but does not choose one, the issue is more likely in the payment display covered in the next section.
1. Guest checkout vs account creation
Requiring account creation before purchase is a common cause of abandonment. Checkout usability research found that 24% of US online shoppers had abandoned a cart in the previous quarter for the single reason that the site required them to create an account, and that 47% of sites that already offered guest checkout did not make it the most prominent option.
Offering guest checkout is not enough on its own; it should be the default, most visible path.
2. Form length and field friction
Longer, more complex forms add friction. A benchmark research measured an average checkout of 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields, and found that most checkouts need only about eight fields.
Field count affects the experience more than step count, and hiding optional fields, using a single name field, and defaulting the billing address to the shipping address can typically reduce the visible field count by 20%–60%.
3. Showing fees, shipping, and taxes early
Surprise costs at the end of checkout drive abandonment. Excluding "just browsing" responses, A cart-abandonment analysis attributes 40% of abandonment to extra costs such as shipping, tax, and fees being too high, and 12% to the buyer not being able to see the total order cost before ordering.
Show the full cost, including cross-border shipping and any duties or taxes, before the buyer commits to the purchase. Because this is a multi-select survey compiled across studies, the reasons sum to more than 100%.
4. Mobile checkout and page performance
Mobile buyers abandon more, and page speed is part of why. An industry study found that mobile checkout UX was mediocre or worse on about 63% of leading sites, with only 2% rated good.
On the performance side, Google's mobile page-speed research found that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Configure payment options at checkout
We recommend starting with 3 to 5 relevant payment methods in the default checkout view, then testing that configuration against actual buyer behavior:
- Keep other relevant methods accessible in a secondary layer.
- Compare selection, submission, and completion data before changing the default view.
With the count set, the following rules can help merchants fill, order, and check the initial checkout slots. We recommend testing each rule separately.
1. Geo-IP dynamic ordering
Detect the buyer's location and surface a relevant local payment method: Pix in Brazil, FPX (Financial Process Exchange) in Malaysia, or GrabPay in Singapore. Our research found that familiar local payment icons can lift initial buyer trust by approximately 20%.
2. Visual trust labels
Add an accurate "Fastest" or "Most Popular" label next to the relevant method. Our study suggests a 5%–12% checkout-conversion improvement from this treatment.
3. Local currency display
Show prices consistently in the buyer's local currency from the product page through checkout. This can reduce page exits by 13%.
Why the most popular payment method shouldn't always come first
Payment methods are often ranked by market share, but these figures answer different questions: some measure e-Commerce transaction value, others adoption or broader usage, and none of them alone shows how easily a buyer completes an online payment.
Antom's Mexico Retail Market Report found that OXXO asks buyers to generate a voucher online and complete the payment at a participating store, so that extra offline step can make it valuable for coverage but less suitable as the first option for every buyer.
Use relevant online share, buyer eligibility, selection, submission, and completed-payment data to test placement. Authorization rate is useful after a payment has been submitted, but it does not explain every earlier checkout exit.
Review the configuration quarterly and use this payment method selection framework to compare candidate methods.
How to measure checkout conversion and prioritize fixes
Before changing the checkout, be clear about two things: which number tells you where buyers leave, and which fix to try first.
1. Checkout conversion vs cart abandonment
Cart abandonment and checkout conversion answer different questions, so one cannot replace the other. Cart abandonment measures the share of sessions that added an item to the cart but did not complete an order, and the compiled average is 70.22% across 50 studies.
Checkout conversion looks only at sessions that entered checkout and measures how many of them completed it. In analytics, a session-level e-Commerce conversion rate is conversions per session, and the same counting basis must be used throughout, whether that is sessions or unique visitors (Google Analytics help; Nielsen Norman Group).
A buyer who never entered checkout can lower a cart-level number but not checkout conversion, so diagnose the stage before choosing a metric.
2. What to fix first: prioritizing checkout changes
It is tempting to copy a generic best-practice list, for example by adding more payment methods, instead of checking where your own buyers leave. Your own checkout data is the better starting point, and it supports a simple priority order:
- Measure where buyers leave, stage by stage: product or cart, checkout entry, payment selection, payment submission, and payment completion.
- Fix the earliest stage with the largest drop first, because an improvement there carries through to every later stage.
- Test each change as an A/B test, meaning a randomized experiment that shows different versions of the same page to different visitor groups at the same time (Google Analytics help).
Baymard's checkout-usability research estimates that a leading e-Commerce site typically has around 32 actionable improvements, and that better checkout UX can raise conversion by about 35%.