The layout of your payment selector rarely loses the order, the button underneath it often does
Teams that redesign the payment step tend to spend their time on the selector itself: radio buttons or tabs, logos in a grid or a list, cards first or last. Baymard Institute’s article on payment method selection, published in September 2023 by research lead Edward Scott, gives that debate less weight than it usually gets. Across Baymard’s desktop and mobile checkout testing, a list of radio buttons, horizontal tabs and vertical tabs all held up well, and test users seldom struggled to pick a method from radio buttons. The one pattern Baymard still advises against is the drop-down, which earlier rounds of testing found to work poorly for part of the users and which no site in its benchmark used.
What did cause trouble sits in two other places: the words on the button the shopper presses after choosing a method, and the options the shop offers in the first place. The button is the cheaper of the two to fix, and in the EU it is also the one with legal consequences.
In the EU the words on the order button are not a free choice
Article 8(2) of the Consumer Rights Directive says that where placing an order means activating a button, that button must be labelled only with the words “order with obligation to pay” or an equally unambiguous formulation. A consumer is not bound by an order placed through a button that falls short. In its judgment of 7 April 2022 in case C-249/21, Fuhrmann-2, the Court of Justice of the EU added that only the words on the button itself count when deciding whether a formulation is equivalent. The page around it, the steps before it and what the shopper could have worked out from the process do not rescue a label that does not say on its own that ordering means paying.
Labels such as Continue, Next and Complete say nothing about payment. A label that names only the destination, such as continue to a bank or to a wallet, tells the shopper where they are going but not that they are committing to pay. Whatever else the button says, the payment obligation has to be in its own words.
The same button should also say where the shopper goes next
Baymard’s testing adds a second requirement from the shopper’s side. Wallets, buy now, pay later options and bank payments often continue outside the shop’s own page, and test users hesitated when the main button stayed generic after they had selected such a method. One participant who had chosen a third-party payment option stopped because the button suggested the order would be finished at the next step, although he had not paid anything yet. A short reassuring text beside the option did not take that doubt away. Baymard’s advice is that the primary button changes with the selection, so that it names the next step for a method that continues elsewhere.
A button that speaks of finishing the order suggests the purchase is done after one tap. When a screen from another party appears instead, the shopper has to work out whether the order exists and whether they are about to pay twice.
Put the two requirements together and the brief for an EU checkout is clear: the button that places the order keeps the obligation to pay in its own wording and adds the method, along the lines of Order and pay with iDEAL | Wero. Whether a specific wording counts as equivalent is for the rules and courts of each market you sell to, so have the final text checked. Baymard’s own examples, written for US checkouts, name only the destination and would not meet the EU requirement on the button that places the order.
The default and the fallback should follow your own shoppers
Baymard recommends, without making it a requirement, preselecting the most popular method where a site’s shoppers clearly favour one. Its US reasoning is that a preselected card lets shoppers start typing their card details at once. A Dutch checkout has a different leader: the Betaalvereniging reports that iDEAL accounts for 71% of all online purchases, against 8% for credit cards. Applied to a Dutch checkout, the same idea points to iDEAL | Wero as the default. That is an inference, not something Baymard tested, and the benefit is a different one: the shopper saves a tap, and the order button names the bank step from the moment the payment step opens. Check your own split first, per country if you sell abroad, because a shop with many Belgian or German customers may have a different leader in each market.
The fallback matters as much as the default. Baymard’s benchmark found 21% of sites with problems in the payment options they offer. In its 2023 survey of 2,219 US online shoppers, 11% had left a checkout in the three months before because their preferred method was missing, and 6% because their credit card had been rejected. Baymard also observes that a shopper without their preferred method usually turns to a card instead, while some use another method when their first attempt fails. Those figures describe US shoppers in 2023 and do not carry over one to one to a Dutch checkout, but the point does: a second route helps only if the shopper can see it from where they land after a failure.
Check the mark as well. Since 29 January 2026 banks, payment service providers and webshops have used the combined iDEAL | Wero logo; for the shopper only the logo has changed. Baymard’s article predates that, and its suggestions for the Netherlands still read iDEAL and SEPA. The name on your button should match the mark in your selector.
Test the button, not the grid
Open your payment step on a phone and select each method in turn. For every one, write down the exact words on the main button and which screen follows when you press it. Where the words do not state that ordering means paying, or stay the same while the destination changes, rewrite them first; it is a copy change, not a redesign. Then set the default against last quarter’s orders per country, replace any drop-down with a visible list, and leave the layout of the selector alone unless your own testing shows a problem with it.
Sources: baymard.com, betaalvereniging.nl, rabobank.nl and eur-lex.europa.eu
