74% of Europeans won’t reduce online shopping

Three in four European consumers (74 percent) say they will stick to their pandemic online shopping levels, meaning they won’t reduce their ecommerce activities now they can shop offline again. So it looks like the shift to ecommerce is here to stay.

During the lockdowns of last year, 96 percent of consumers in Europe shopped online. That’s up from 60 percent one year earlier. And it looks like the shift to online shopping is here to stay. Because 74 percent of consumers say they have no intention to significantly reduce their online shopping now that they can access the main street shops again.

Unprepared for surge in cross-border payments

This is shown in ‘the New State of Retail‘, a report from Checkout.com, among over 10,000 consumers and 500 online retailers. One of the key findings is that 43 percent of retailers said they weren’t prepared for last year’s surge in cross-border payments across Europe. They didn’t have the necessary payment methods in place to capture the demand from new markets within Europe. This resulted in lost revenue.

80% of consumers expect to use new payment methods such as BNPL or crypto.

High demand for new payment methods

At the same time, 80 percent of consumers expect to pay using new payment methods such as Buy Now Pay Later, crypto, and digital wallets. And 30 percent say they now actively want to try new payment methods based on their digital payment experiences last year. One in eight consumers used a new digital payment method for the first time.

Localization performance pain points

The report also takes a look at opportunities for online retailers. Laser-localized payments should lead to an optimized revenue, but there are still some localization performance pain points, according to Checkout.com. For example, 74 percent of online retailers don’t offer all payment pages in the local language. And two in three don’t offer local payment methods in every country they serve.

And 83 percent of ecommerce merchants are without direct access to a local acquirer in every key market that they operate within. “This can negatively impact approval rates”, the authors suggest.