How To Decrease Checkout Abandonment by Deconstructing Checkout Conversion Challenges

Cart abandonment can be solved with a variety of marketing tactics: pop-ups before the user leaves the site, loyalty incentives, or emailing their cart to their inbox. Checkout abandonment (normally what happens after the user clicks ‘buy’) should be being solved by your payment gateway, and if it’s not, you may be in trouble. In an effort to better help you understand where your eCommerce conversion rates might be failing, here are a couple common checkout conversion challenges we’ve seen, and why it’s important to fix them:

Offer Local Payment Types, Local Language & Local Currency

Simply put, customers want to feel at home when they shop – but this doesn’t mean that they won’t cross borders to get the items they need from eCommerce merchants. In fact, 57 percent of customers have made a cross-border purchase in the last 6 months.

But what if a customer comes to your site and can’t even read your product descriptions? Disaster! Your page should be able to recognize the shopper’s location and dynamically display their language – but this is only step one.

Step Two? Think about local currency. Have you ever purchased something without knowing the price? Maybe you have, but probably not often. Yet, that is what you are asking your customers to do by not presenting the price of your goods and services in their local currency. By local currency, we mean the currency used in their home country to make everyday purchases.

If you are not displaying the appropriate currency to your customers, you are causing friction in the checkout process and are losing sales. If you are only pricing in USD, for example, chances are people in the UK are leaving your site and purchasing the product from another site that has the product in their own currency.

And even worse – chances are good that they will also never return to your site! If for whatever reason the customer still decides to purchase in the foreign currency, it will likely be flagged as fraud if you aren’t able to accept multiple currencies. Lastly, make sure you are accepting multiple payment types to increase the likelihood of converting global shoppers. And no, we don’t just mean multiple different types of credit cards.

If you want to attract global shoppers, offer Alipay for Chinese consumers, Sofort for Germans, the list goes on and on. 59 percent of shoppers will not make a purchase if their preferred payment method is not offered – offering local payment types is one way to easily decrease checkout abandonment!

All this effort is not for nothing – our merchants that have localized for global shoppers have seen an increase in conversion rates up to 10 percent!

Connect to Multiple Banks to Decrease Checkout Abandonment

Unfortunately, many online merchants work with a payment gateway that is only connected to one bank, leaving them without critical conversions (especially for global shoppers). If you are trying to process a transaction from a German shopper through a U.S. bank, they are likely to get declined – Scheiße! If you have a payment gateway that can connect you to multiple banks around the globe, you can increase your conversions up to 17 percent!

Additionally, if you connect to multiple banks, you should have the ability to failover transactions (should they fail at the first bank) to each of the remaining banks. This will increase the chances that each of your transactions is accepted and decrease checkout abandonment by increasing your conversions by up to 3 percent.

Get Your Fraud Rules in Check

We’ve mentioned fraud a couple times in terms of how to decrease checkout abandonment – obviously, if a transaction gets flagged as fraud, you won’t be making that cash any time soon.

While it is important to have a payment gateway that can hook you up to a robust fraud solution, it is more important to understand how to set up and create your fraud rules – too strict and you will be creating friction, too lax and you will be letting fraudsters run your site! Optimizing your rule sets will reduce the time spent on manually reviewing orders and cut down on false positives, ultimately enhancing your customers’ experience.