Inflation and rising interest rates are making consumers wary about spending, which means businesses have to work harder to convert interested shoppers into paying customers. Successful conversion depends on a fast and intuitive checkout experience – without friction that could cause customers to abandon their carts. This is especially true during a difficult economic period in which customers may be more hesitant to purchase in the first place.

Stripe partnered with Edgar, Dunn & Company to analyse the checkout flows of the top e-commerce and subscription businesses in five countries in Asia Pacific (APAC), and we found a startling fact: 99% of APAC websites make at least five basic errors in their checkout process. These include not offering popular payment methods and not allowing customers to save their payment method details for future use. The net result is a lot of money left on the table.

The majority of businesses also neglected to integrate key revenue opportunities into their checkout flows. For example, we found that 54% of APAC websites don’t offer cross-sells at checkout, and 89% don’t offer upsell opportunities, overlooking a proven way to increase average order size.

We’ve consolidated our findings to help businesses convert more customers and grow revenue by improving their checkout flows. This report highlights checkout best practices as well as businesses that have used Stripe to implement them.

This report contains four sections:

1. Checkout conversion strategies
   
2. Payment method preferences
   
3. Mobile optimisation
   
4. Subscription best practices
   

Checkout conversion strategies

The best checkouts optimise for speed, security, and convenience.

The importance of a fast checkout can’t be overstated: 49% of customers give up on a purchase after three minutes. This means businesses are losing about half of all online customers who intend to make a purchase. In addition, only 10% of customers always complete an online purchase. This provides businesses with substantial opportunity to convert the 90% who don’t.

Security is another critical factor. The customers we surveyed said the top reason they would perceive a business negatively is if its website didn’t feel secure or trustworthy. Beyond offering a secure checkout flow, it’s important for businesses to display logos and credentials like “Verified by Visa” or “Mastercard SecureCode” to build consumer trust in their brands.

Finally, businesses can optimise their checkout flow by giving customers the option to save payment details for future use, surfacing recommended products through upselling and cross-selling, and reminding customers to complete their purchase if they abandon their basket.

The top checkout form errors and missed opportunities

Ninety-nine percent of APAC websites made at least five basic errors in their checkout process. Here are some of the most common mistakes and missed opportunities:

• 79% didn’t display security logos on their checkout page, jeopardising customer trust.
  
• 82% didn’t follow up with customers who had abandoned their basket.
  
• 89% didn’t recommend higher-end versions of a product or service through upselling.
  
• 54% didn’t recommend related products or services through cross-selling.
  
• 45% of APAC websites let customers attempt to pay with an expired card.
  

Many websites also had transactional errors related to card processing:

Checklist: How to optimise the checkout experience

Payment method preferences

Payment method preferences are diverse and vary regionally. To expand global reach, businesses have to stay on top of how and when their customers prefer to pay. That could mean offering one-click checkout in some markets, local payment methods like PayNow in others, or instalment plans in regions where buy now, pay later options are popular.

However, it’s not just about increasing the number of payment options – businesses need to ensure that they’re surfacing the right ones, too. Ninety-seven percent of customers said it was important for a website to provide the common payment methods in their country, and 84% said they would frequently abandon their basket if their preferred payment method wasn’t available.

Beyond local payment methods, businesses should also consider letting customers pay in instalments, especially if they have a high average order value. Buy now, pay later methods, like Afterpay in Australia, are increasingly popular: 71% of customers said they would be more likely to complete a purchase if they were available. However, only 40% of e-commerce sites in APAC offered them. A Stripe study found that businesses saw a 27% increase in sales when they offered Afterpay.

Sixty percent of APAC customers are more likely to use a mobile phone than a desktop or laptop to shop online. This means businesses can reduce friction at checkout and enable their customers to check out faster when paying with Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat Pay, or AliPay. In a separate Stripe study, we found that businesses doubled their sales in China when they offered Alipay, a popular payment method in the country.

Checklist: How to localise and improve your payments experience

Mobile optimisation

Roughly half of the customers we surveyed use smartphones more often than desktop devices to browse and shop for products online. Survey respondents are also shopping through social media, with 80% saying they use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to make purchases.

Businesses need to improve their mobile checkout experience to accommodate these preferences. While 98% of businesses we surveyed adapted their checkout flow to a smaller screen, the majority did not support wallets, a mobile-friendly payment method that allows customers to store payment information, such as debit or credit cards, on their phones.

More than three-quarters of customers (84%) are more likely to complete a purchase if a website offers one-click checkout options, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. Saving a payment method can also provide customers with the option to use one-click checkout in the future. However, only one-third of the websites we analysed offered this feature.

The top mobile optimisation errors

• 66% of mobile checkouts did not provide the ability to save payment information for future purchases.
  
• 89% did not support Apple Pay or Google Pay.
  
• 60% did not offer buy now, pay later services like Afterpay.
  
• 54% did not recommend related products or services through cross-selling.
  
• 26% failed to surface a numeric keypad to help with entering card information.
  

Checklist: How to optimise for mobile and unified commerce

Global subscription best practices

Subscriptions can be an effective tool for creating high-value repeat customers, but any mistakes in the checkout process put recurring revenue at risk.

We found that 79% of APAC customers have had a negative experience with subscriptions – with the top reason being that it takes too many steps to cancel a subscription. One-fifth of the top 217 global subscription sites had at least three basic errors in their transaction process, including not confirming card type (35%) and not automatically verifying card number (30%). This is an improvement over last year, when 41% of subscription businesses were making these types of errors.

With checkout flows improving, subscription businesses need to provide a thoroughly seamless customer experience in order to gain a competitive edge. Businesses need to pay attention to the factors that could deter new subscribers or cause existing ones to cancel when they update their payment details.

Top opportunities to improve the global subscription experience

• 57% of subscription sites did not offer a free trial, which would allow users to try before they buy.
  
• 51% of subscription sites did not provide fields for coupon or promo codes.
  
• 58% of subscription sites did not facilitate account creation through integration with a social media profile (e.g., Facebook or Google).
  
• 39% of subscription sites required customers to manually enter their address instead of offering - capabilities.
  
• 25% of customers said they are deterred from subscribing if they can’t modify or cancel their subscriptions online.
  

Checklist: Best practices for subscription businesses

How Stripe can help

In order to successfully navigate the uncertain economic conditions ahead, businesses need to ensure they’re offering every customer the smoothest possible path to purchase. That means a frictionless checkout experience which surfaces recommended products so customers don’t have to hunt for what they need.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend time and engineering resources building your own solutions. With Stripe, you can increase conversion globally and provide a best-in-class customer experience – all by integrating with our unified platform. With our suite of products, you can:

Offer a seamless checkout experience

• Use our pre-built, hosted payments page with Stripe Checkout to launch a conversion-optimised experience with minimal development time.
  
• Use our embeddable UI components with Payment Element to design a secure, conversion-optimised payments experience that perfectly matches your site and dynamically surfaces the most relevant 25+ payment methods.
  
• Create a full payment page with Payment Links and share the link without writing any code.
  
• Let customers save payment details and check out faster with one-click checkout with Link.
  

Build for global expansion and localised experiences

• Accept payments from customers around the world with cardholder support in more than 195 countries.
  
• Let customers pay with their local payment method – Afterpay and BECS for customers in Australia, Konbini and Furikomi in Japan, PayNow in Singapore, FPX in Malaysia, or popular wallets like GrabPay, Alipay, and WeChat Pay.
  
• Dynamically display relevant payment methods based on IP address, browser locale, cookies, and other signals.
  
• Add and scale payment method support, including wallets and buy now, pay later, without filling out multiple forms or following one-off onboarding processes.
  

Optimise for mobile and unified commerce

• Use fully responsive checkout forms that work across any device.
  
• Get built-in Apple Pay and Google Pay without any additional registration or domain validation required.
  
• Provide a seamless experience across online and offline channels (e.g., reserving online and picking up in store).
  

Launch subscriptions quickly and turn one-time purchases into recurring revenue

• Collect recurring payments via card, direct debit (BECS in Australia), bank transfers (Furikomi in Japan), and other popular payment methods instantly.
  
• Experiment with pricing by using flexible billing logic for everything from per-seat pricing to metered billing, out of the box.
  
• Allow customers to self-serve with a portal to easily upgrade, downgrade, pause, or resume subscriptions.
  
• Reduce churn with Smart Retries, automated failed payment emails, and an automatic Card account updater.
  

Get in touch with a Stripe expert today to learn how you can optimise your checkout flow and scale your business.

Methodology

Stripe partnered with Edgar, Dunn & Company to analyse the top 100 e-commerce websites in each of five countries in APAC – Japan, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand – based on online sales volume from Statista. Where the number of websites was not sufficient, we augmented the sample with the top websites by online traffic according to Similarweb.

We tested each website for errors by placing a product in the shopping cart to simulate an online purchase and, in some cases, using a VPN to complete the checkout process to mimic customers based in different countries. We analysed checkout flows against a list of 26 criteria related to checkout form design, mobile optimisation, localisation, and buyer trust and security.

We also analysed the top 217 global B2C subscription websites that offer digital content and physical goods, based on website traffic from Crunchbase. The sample included the following categories of subscription websites: media and streaming, file sharing, fitness apps, food delivery, e-learning, and news. We excluded B2B subscription websites where pricing is often tailored to individual clients, adult entertainment platforms, and online gambling websites.

Lastly, we surveyed 542 consumers in APAC to uncover insights around current shopping behaviours and trends, payment preferences, and factors that affect the checkout experience.