PYMNTS.com/BlueSnap: Mobile Checkout Lag Behind at Many Merchants

Payments , Retail Banking
07.03.2016 10:30 am

A review of 39,000 data points, across 657 sites and 14 merchant categories shows that merchants are getting worse, not better, when it comes to optimizing their sites for mobile checkout, leaving as much as $152 billion dollars on the table.

“Of course, that $152 billion is not lost forever,” says BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier, “they are just lost to other merchants who are better able to accommodate a mobile shopper.”

That is the key finding from the latest Checkout Conversion Index (CCI),released today. CCI, is a PYMNTS.com/BlueSnap collaboration and measures how well merchants are doing at moving consumers thru the end-to-end buying process on a mobile device – increasingly the device of choice for transacting online. CCI is a quarterly Index and accompanying report that benchmarks the performance of 657 retailers that represent over 70% of all U.S. eCommerce retail spend (exclusive of Amazon) using 55 attributes that inform the pre-and post-checkout experience.

The Index this quarter shows that the overall CCI Index score fell to 53, down 3.1 percent from 55 last quarter. Forty-eight percent of merchants scored well below the average Index score. Overall, time to checkout actually got worse, not better, as did total clicks from start to checkout. Some of worst performers were also the largest merchants.

“It was a bit of a surprise to see the downward trend in the space of just three month,” remarked Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS.com. “Merchants who want to embrace the mobile consumer need to recognize the tradeoffs between doing the things that they think benefit them – like trying to capture a customer email by forcing registration before checkout – and what really benefits them – like removing the friction that gets in the way of converting those shoppers to buyers.”

CCI scores and weights the 10 most important features to optimizing mobile checkout. They are: