94% of European checkouts have multiple errors

94% of the most popular e-commerce websites in Europe have five or more errors on their checkout pages. Meanwhile, 21% of European consumers abandon a purchase if the checkout takes longer than one minute. In addition, 15% of consumers in Europe leave their online shopping cart when their desired payment method is not available. This means there is still lots to do for e-commerce businesses in Europe, even for the major ones.

The fact that 94% of the most popular e-commerce websites in Europe have multiple errors is quite shocking. Especially when taking into account that last year it was just 58%.

Overlooking the checkout flow

All these errors add unnecessary friction for customers, and close to 40% 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, some of the biggest e-commerce companies in Europe often overlook one crucial step to making a sale: the checkout flow.

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. However, when combined, they add up to a needlessly difficult checkout experience for customers and lost sales.

Abandoning the purchase

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

The average cart abandonment rate currently sits at 68.8%. 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 errors

These are the most common checkout errors:

• Not allowing customers to save their payment information for future use (75%)
• Making mistakes when formatting payment information or displaying error messages (42%)
• Not supporting address auto-complete (61%) or not supporting address auto-complete nor native auto-fill (9%)
• Not defaulting to let customers use their billing address as their shipping address (10%)