A new report by Stripe has found that the majority of ecommerce websites across seven of the biggest European economies have basic errors in their websites.
The company examined the 450 most popular ecommerce sites based on Alexa rankings across the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Spain, finding that 58% had at least three basic errors.
Common issues included not automatically verifying card numbers when entered, present on 42% of sites. 39% let customers attempt to pay with an expired card date, while 45% did not confirm card type when a card number was entered and 19% did not allow card numbers to be entered without spaces.
Many retailers did not take account of the adoption of cross-border shopping, with 74% of checkouts not translated to local languages when customers elsewhere visited the site.
Some key mobile features were missing, with only 12% of sites supporting mobile wallets such as Apple or Google Pay and 29% failing to surface a numerical keypad to enter card information on mobile. However, only 4% of sites didn’t adapt to mobile screen sizes.
“A poorly designed checkout form puts an unnecessary burden on customers,” the report said. “They want clicking “pay” to be the final step in the purchase journey and don’t want to have to go through your form twice to fix basic errors. They also want checkout forms that adapt to their references. For example, customers should be able to enter card numbers how they want (with or without spaces) and not encounter any errors.”
