94% of European checkouts have multiple errors

The vast majority (94 percent) of the most popular ecommerce websites in Europe have five or more errors on their checkout pages. Meanwhile, 21 percent of European consumers abandon a purchase if the checkout takes longer than one minute.

And 15 percent of consumers in Europe leave their online shopping cart when their desired payment method isn’t available. So, this means there’s still lots to do for ecommerce businesses in Europe, even for the major ones.

The state of European checkouts 2021

Consultancy firm Edgar, Dunn & Company analyzed the 800 biggest ecommerce websites in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. It also analyzed the checkout pages of the 200 biggest subscription services and surveyed 800 consumers across Europe. This resulted in The State of European Checkouts 2021 [pdf].

The fact that 94 percent of the most popular ecommerce websites in Europe have multiple errors is quite shocking, especially when you take into account that last year it was just 58 percent (of the top 450 websites).

Last year, 58% of ecommerce websites had multiple errors.

All these errors add unnecessary friction for customers, and close to 40 percent of these customers said they have (more than) doubled their online shopping in the past year. This is great for business of course, but this also means companies have to successfully capitalize on this potential. “However, we found that some of the biggest ecommerce companies in Europe often overlook one crucial step to making a sale: the checkout flow”, Stripe writes.

Common issues on the checkout page

The study shows that common issues include poor card information formatting and error handling, not offering popular payment methods, and not allowing customers to save their payment method for future use. “On their own, these issues may seem small. But, when combined, they add up to a needlessly difficult checkout experience for customers and lost sales.”

21% of shoppers cancel a purchase if it takes too long.

One in five online shoppers in Europe (21 percent) say they would abandon a purchase if it takes more than one minute to check out. But 44 percent say that, on average, it takes them more than three minutes to complete a purchase. And 17 percent say a long and complicated checkout was a reason to cancel an order in the past year.

Average cart abandonment rate at 68.8%

Research by the Baymard Institute shows that, worldwide, the average cart abandonment rate currently sits at 68.8 percent. This automatically means that solving basic errors on the checkout page and removing all possible hurdles in the purchase process can significantly increase sales.

Most common checkout form errors

Here are the top four checkout form errors, as found by Stripe:

• making mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages (42% companies analyzed made at least three of these mistakes)
• not supporting address auto-complete (61 percent) or not supporting address auto-complete nor native auto-fill (9 percent)
• not defaulting to let customers use their billing address as their shipping address (10 percent)
• not allowing customers to save their payment information for future use (75 percent)