How Amazon Pay facilitates a seamless mobile checkout experience

Research from the Baymard Institute finds that 70% of online shoppers who add a product to their shopping cart never complete the purchase¹. Such cart abandonment becomes more pronounced in a mobile setting. With US mobile sales as a proportion of all e-commerce sales expected to increase from 45% in 2019 to 54% in 2021², businesses need to follow mobile optimization best practices to improve their customer experience. Amazon Pay engaged the Baymard Institute to identify 10 starter best practices to optimize the mobile checkout on e-commerce websites.

Best practices to optimize your mobile checkout

1. Make ‘Guest Checkout’ the most prominent option at account selection, and hide username and password fields until the user selects the ‘Sign In’ or ‘Create Account’ option.
2. Provide appropriate touch keyboard layouts for select fields — such as credit card, and zip/postal code fields (i.e. customize the type of on-screen keyboard depending on what information users are populating) — to help users quickly and easily type their information.
3. Facilitate easy typing and verification of the credit card number by auto-formatting the card number with spaces that match to how the number is printed on the user’s physical card.
4. Format the credit card expiration date fields to match the format on physical cards.
5. Help users understand where they have been and where they are going in the mobile checkout flow by providing a progress indicator at each checkout step.
6. Avoid displaying unnecessary and often redundant fields by setting the user’s ‘Billing Address’ to equal their ‘Shipping Address’ by default.
7. Provide users with the data they need to make an informed purchasing decision by providing a total order cost before seeking payment information.
8. Help users distinguish between the order review and confirmation step by including a second ‘Place Order’ button at the top of the order review step.
9. Avoid forcing users to retype duplicate information by asking for the same info only once during checkout and by reusing that info when necessary.
10. Provide users with at least one third-party payment option, in particular if catering to international users.

As a follow-up to our webinar on this topic, we want to demonstrate how Amazon Pay goes beyond these optimizations to make it easy for mobile shoppers to complete their purchase. Amazon Pay is a service where consumers can use their familiar and trusted Amazon login credentials and the payment information stored in their Amazon account to complete a transaction.

The first mobile optimization suggested by the research is to provide a prominent ‘Guest Checkout’ option. Offering Amazon Pay as a payment method avoids the need for consumers to populate their personal and payment information while using the ‘Guest Checkout’ option, making it easy and fast. The next set of optimizations focus on providing appropriate keyboard layouts, formatting the credit card number and expiration fields to match the physical credit card, setting billing and shipping addresses to be the same, not requesting duplicate information, and providing a progress indicator in the checkout flow. While these optimizations will improve a mobile user’s checkout experience, Amazon Pay goes a step further by eliminating these steps for consumers.

By enabling consumers to use the information in their Amazon accounts, Amazon Pay avoids the need for any typing in the checkout process, let alone typing any redundant information. They simply need to choose their preferred card from those stored in their Amazon account to make their payment. Amazon Pay automatically exports shipping and billing addresses from the Amazon account as well. Additionally, providing a progress indicator will only reiterate to the consumer how fast and easy it is to use Amazon Pay to complete the checkout.

Amazon is a customer-obsessed company, and we strive to provide consumers with an easy and trusted experience whether they shop on or off Amazon. Amazon Pay is a service that extends the seamless on-Amazon experience to off-Amazon commerce purchases through any channel i.e. mobile or web or voice or physical stores.

To sign up and start offering Amazon Pay as a payment option for your consumers follow this link: https://pay.amazon.com/signup.