The various demands of ecommerce customers shift at a dizzying pace, but the overall trend is constant: Merchants need to provide shoppers with what they want — and they want a lot.
The lure of online shopping is in its ease, like a smooth, seamless, leisurely walk through a mall, but without the exercise. The in-store annoyances are gone, such as having to turn a blouse inside out to find the price, or trying to find someone, anyone, to see if a dress comes in another color, or the anxiety of losing one’s mind when mired in a long checkout line and yelling, “Can someone else please open?’’
But online shoppers have become discerning and demanding; actually very picky. The enjoyment of colorful screen displays and easy-to-find prices isn’t enough if the website is a rocky ride. When a chilled-out shopping journey is constantly interrupted by a pop-up show of flashing discounts and gimmicks, shoppers can feel like they’re dodging barkers at a circus. And if a shopper stays the course and the payment is declined, it’s likely goodbye.
Especially for a first-time shopper on a site.
Mutual trust is the first step toward personalized checkout
To avoid that fate and instead provide a delightful customer experience, a retailer needs to be able to trust their customers, according to Signifyd CEO Raj Ramanand, who has spoken about the importance of trust in building customer lifetime value. Once that trust is established, he continued, “I need a way in real time, at the moment when someone is making a return, when someone is checking out, at that moment, I need to be able to personalize that experience.”
There’s not much wiggle room for a merchant: 48% of consumers surveyed, by polling firm Talker Research for Signifyd, said one bad experience is enough to bid goodbye to the retailer. A total of 82% said they’d be gone after two bad experiences. And patience among customers runs even thinner when a cart is full – two in three shoppers want the whole checkout over in less than four minutes; some in less than two, according to Capterra.
“Customers buy an experience,” said Joy Daniels, an ecommerce marketing expert at Adobe. “They don’t necessarily buy a product. You really need a platform that can help you provide the kind of customization and also the options that customers are demanding.”
The personalization challenge with first-time shoppers
A quick, smooth checkout can be hard enough when it’s an established customer, but when it’s a first-time shopper, security concerns can handcuff the merchant completely and frustrate the buyer.
This dilemma is easy to understand. Online fraud will cost online merchants more than $300 billion during the five years ending in 2027, according to Juniper Research.
A merchant relying on their own data has no transaction history with the customer and can struggle to verify the authenticity of the transaction. This creates significant risk. It also prevents the merchant from personalizing the experience.
But personalization is critical for developing customer lifetime value and data is key to marketing, so the merchant asks for information. They want the buyer to open a loyalty account.
“If I were a marketer, I think the value is so high for that lifetime value and being able to capture you into my loyalty program, that I’d probably err on that side,” said Signifyd’s Nicole Jass, who has deep expertise in the payments space. “I’d be looking at pre-filled forms and ways I can get you to put in your information quickly, and then give me permission to talk with you again.”
Conversely, first-time customers are dubious of the merchant’s data security and don’t trust divulging too much personal information. A Signifyd survey shows that 91% of consumers believe their data needs to be protected by merchants, according to Signifyd’s State of Commerce 2025 report.
False declines destroy customer experience
At an impasse, 26% of online shoppers abandon their carts when they are asked to create an account, Baymard Institute found.
The worst occurs when the payment of a legitimate first-time shopper is falsely declined at checkout. A Signifyd survey shows that when a payment is declined, 45% of shoppers polled try an alternative payment form, but the other half don’t bother.
“Every day, it gets more expensive to acquire customers,” David Cost, vice president of digital and ecommerce at Rainbow Apparel, told Digital Commerce 360. “There’s no quicker way to lose a customer or squander marketing efforts than rejecting somebody’s order that’s legit because you think it’s fraud.”
Meanwhile, the shopper just wants to buy the product.
”I don’t like that a company that wants to save your information for future use, or they want you to open a credit card or sign up for texts. And I find it annoying and intrusive because it means more and more of my information will be out there that someone can get into,” says Dianne Edwards, a Southern Californian who frequently shops online and speaks for many. “I do have a few sites where I’ve opened an account, but just for companies that I buy from regularly. Mostly I want to do a guest checkout. I think AI is getting more and more intrusive and I worry about that.”
Guest checkout remains popular with many consumers
Guest checkout is preferred by 43% of shoppers, with 74% believing it’s quicker; 56% not wanting to open another online account; and 47% preferring the limited information required.
If there were any doubt that many consumers prefer to keep their private information private, consider that three in four customers use a burner email account for online shopping anyway, and 72% provide fake demographic information, at least some of the time.
It’s a conundrum because studies show that even if online shoppers won’t divulge information, they still want personalized attention, suggestions, recommendations and pre-filled or one-click checkout — but not too much attention because it can slow down the shopping process.
Statistics compiled from various sources by True List, a digital marketing firm, show that while an efficient and simple user interface increases conversion rates by up to 200%, a one-second-page-response delay causes a 7% reduction in sealing the deal. Merchants have only three seconds for a website to meet the expectations of 53% of mobile users. And 39% of shoppers leave a website if the images take too long to load, or don’t load at all.
A shopper’s patience at checkout is limited. And if a merchant stalls over a transaction, questioning whether to approve it or not, that shopper may not stick around to learn the decision. When the clatter at checkout gets too loud, consumers opt out: 82% in a Capterra study said no thanks and abandoned their carts because the registration process at checkout was too complicated.
Checkout can be a differentiator with a trusted partner’s help
While the ubiquitous AI may worry some, its vast reach can help merchants turn a first-time shopper into a long-time customer, and a frustrated shopper into a happy customer. By partnering with a consortium model, such as Signifyd’s, the unknown shopper gains a face, because Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform knows the identity and intent of 98% of shoppers who arrive for the first time on a site. Signifyd provides a guarantee on approved orders that enables the merchant to accept the transaction instead of losing the customer for fear of fraud. Signifyd’s solution sorts fraudulent from legitimate orders in milliseconds, bringing calm to a shopper, instead of defeat.
Guest checkouts, though they provide temporary and limited information, are sufficient because Signifyd can attest to the authenticity of the shopper and provide account protection.
There’s little doubt that ecommerce retailers overall benefit from partnering with a fraud protection company that can step up and smooth out their checkout process. Baymard Institute says that with better checkout flow and design the U.S. and EU ecommerce conversion rate for the average large-sized ecommerce site could increase 35.26%, which amounts to the recovery of $260 billion of lost orders, calculated on combined ecommerce sales of $738 billion, according to the institute’s 2023 analysis.
Social commerce brings opportunities — and new checkout challenges
And that is only a beginning. Expanding checkout to social media platforms provides another growth opportunity. The global social commerce market is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.
Enabling checkout on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, not only allows customers to buy directly from the site without leaving the app, but also offers a vehicle for merchants to establish direct connections with customers
In the year ending March 2024, 60.9% of users polled said they made purchases from Facebook, while 35.5% bought from TikTok and 34.3% from Instagram, according to EMARKETER.
Social commerce, it seems, is the latest in must-have channels for merchants looking to serve consumers’ demands. But it certainly isn’t the last.
Photo by Getty Images
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