7 out of 10 people visiting your e-commerce site or app will not buy your products.

It is true, irrespective of the industry and markets you address.

Isn't it a bad proposition to lose so many of your visitors?

You're spending time and effort getting the perfect website, putting in so much effort to keep users on your site, and growing your base of loyal customers. Your visitors still come, go, and abandon their carts at the end of the purchase process.

Cart abandonment is one of the most common problems in e-commerce.

A customer who reaches the checkout has already shown a clear intent to purchase. Losing them at that point is not just a missed sale but a failure of the checkout experience itself, sometimes driven by payment friction.

So, what are the reasons for cart abandonment?

Consumers abandon your shopping cart for various reasons, as depicted below:

Why consumers abandon shopping carts? Source: unific.com

Some of the key reasons cited are shipping costs, total cost of goods, hassle of returning goods, too many or too few payment options, and security concerns about presenting the card for payment.

In this article, we will look only at payment options and security concerns, and how to avoid them using SRC.

Payment options

If a customer discovers after the entire purchase process that he cannot pay with his preferred payment method, he'll likely close the screen and abandon the cart, never returning to that site.

Alternatively, consider a scenario where multiple checkout options are available, and too many payment gateways accept debit and credit cards. You get confused, don't know what to choose, and abandon the cart.

The most important thing for e-commerce sites is to provide the option that consumers prefer.

Payment friction at checkout is often invisible to the merchant but very visible to the customer.

A form that asks for card details the customer has already saved elsewhere, a redirect to an unfamiliar third-party payment page, or a long sequence of authentication steps all add up.

Each extra step between the customer's purchase decision and the completed transaction is an opportunity for them to leave.

The checkout payment conversion rate is the clearest measure of how the payment experience is working. A high abandonment rate at payment points is directly related to problems with the payment experience.

Merchants and payment providers who track checkout payment conversion separately from overall cart abandonment can identify and fix the specific friction points driving loss.

Security issues

Consumers are typically concerned about payment security, and this concern is likely to be higher on relatively new or unfamiliar sites, or when they shop on their mobiles. Consumers don't want to share their personal information and card details with others because they fear being defrauded.

The security concern is not irrational. Data breaches affecting e-commerce platforms have been well-publicized, and consumers have learned to be cautious about where they enter their card details.

For a new or lesser-known merchant, the trust deficit is real. A checkout page that asks the customer to enter their full card number, CVV, and billing address on an unfamiliar site is asking them to make a trust decision at exactly the moment when they are most likely to stop.

Payment friction from cart abandonment stemming from security concerns is particularly difficult to address through conventional means.

Displaying security badges and SSL certificates helps only marginally.

It does not resolve the underlying problem: the customer is being asked to share sensitive payment data with a merchant they may not fully trust yet. The better answer is not to ask them to share that data at all.

How is SRC relevant in reducing cart abandonment rates?

Secure Remote Commerce is a secure, interoperable specification issued by EMVCo. It has the potential to enhance the online checkout experience, improve transaction security, and simplify integration for merchants and commerce platforms.

SRC offers a consistent and frictionless checkout journey. The process is straightforward:

It reduces the number of times a user must manually enter payment information.

The way SRC achieves this is worth understanding in detail. When a cardholder enrolls in SRC, their card details are securely stored by an SRC system operator. At checkout on any participating merchant site, the customer is recognized, and their stored payment credentials are available. They do not need to re-enter their card number, expiry, or CVV.

The merchant never sees or stores the raw card data. The transaction completes in fewer steps, without the customer having to make a trust decision about sharing their details with yet another merchant.

For merchants, the advantage lies in having a payment conversion rate that accurately reflects genuine purchase intent.

When a customer reaches the checkout page, they already have trust in both the product and the merchant. SRC eliminates the payment step as a potential reason for customers to abandon their purchase.

The SRC initiative addresses the challenges of inconsistent payment processes and the vulnerability of data stored online while providing transparency into transaction data shared among participants.

SRC is compatible with EMV tokenization and EMV 3D Secure, which can be offered by a variety of participants to increase the security of payment data.

EMV tokenization means that the card number used in an SRC transaction is a token. Even if that token is intercepted, it cannot be used at a different merchant or outside the specific transaction context for which it was generated.

EMV 3D Secure adds a layer of authentication that is frictionless when transaction risk is low and is challenged only when additional verification is needed. Together, these two capabilities mean that SRC transactions are both easier for the customer and more secure than traditional card-not-present (CNP) transactions, in which the raw card number is entered manually.

For any e-commerce business looking to reduce shopping cart abandonment at checkout, SRC addresses the two problems that matter most. It makes the payment step faster and simpler.

And it removes the security concern that causes customers to hesitate at the point of completing a transaction they had already decided to make.

The infrastructure to support SRC is being built out across the payments ecosystem. Merchants, payment gateways, and card networks are all working toward broader adoption of SRC. For e-commerce platforms that implement it early, the improvement in checkout payment conversion is a direct commercial benefit that adds up with every transaction.