A buy button is a second checkout, so design it as one
A buy button hands the checkout to someone else. When a shopper taps PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay in the cart, the wallet’s own sheet takes over the work your forms would normally do: the card, the billing address and often the delivery address come from details the shopper stored earlier. In a PaymentsJournal column published on 12 December 2022, David Fletcher made the case for these buttons on exactly that basis. One tap replaces the typing, so the shopper spends less time between deciding to buy and paying. He added two conditions that are easy to skip: offer more than one button, because shoppers use different wallets, and do not put extra steps in front of people who chose the fast route, such as asking for extra details to collect marketing data.
The time a button saves is lost again on the first extra screen
The speed case was measured in the same year. PYMNTS research published in August 2022, covering more than 800 top US online retailers in 17 sectors, timed buy button checkouts at 68 seconds on average in the second quarter of 2022, 46% faster than other ways of paying. The same research shows how quickly that advantage disappears. Checkouts at merchants that required a customer profile alongside their buy buttons averaged 1 minute 22 seconds, 37% slower than buy button checkouts that asked for no additional information.
Adding a button does not change the rest of the checkout. The shopper taps, approves in the wallet and then lands on a page that asks for a phone number, a password, a confirmation of the address the wallet just sent, or a tick in a terms box placed under the fold. Together those screens turn a one-tap route into an ordinary checkout with an extra step at the start.
The fix is a decision per field rather than a rule. List everything your normal checkout collects and mark what the wallet already supplies. For what is left, ask whether you need it before the order or can ask for it afterwards. A delivery time slot or a pickup point may genuinely belong before payment. An account, a newsletter opt-in or a birthday does not, and can be offered on the confirmation page to a shopper who has just paid.
Several buttons help only when the shopper finds theirs at once
Retailers were already adding buttons in 2022. In the PYMNTS data, 35% of online businesses offered two or more buy buttons in the second quarter of that year and 9.4% offered three or more, with PayPal the most common button at an adoption rate of 76% across the merchants studied. More buttons serve more shoppers, but they also take space. On a phone, a row of wallet buttons in the cart can push the ordinary route to checkout below the fold, and the shopper who wants to pay another way has to look for it.
The Dutch payment mix adds a second consideration. According to the Betaalvereniging, iDEAL accounts for 71% of online purchases in the Netherlands, against 8% for credit cards. For most Dutch shoppers the fast route is their bank, not a card wallet. iDEAL describes its own extension for this: a shopper can store delivery details in an iDEAL profile at the bank and choose to share them with the webshop along with the payment, with the bank or payment provider telling customers when that is available. A row of card wallets at the top of the cart, with iDEAL | Wero lower down, puts the method most of your Dutch shoppers came to use in second place.
Order the buttons by what your own shoppers use, measured per device, and keep the ordinary checkout button at least as visible as the express row.
The order data has to survive the shortcut
A buy button moves data entry from your form to a wallet the shopper filled in months or years ago. That is the point of it, and it brings its own failure. A stored address can be out of date, a name can be formatted differently from your system, and a house number with an addition may not arrive in the field your warehouse reads. The shopper does not see any of that at the moment of payment. They see it when the parcel goes to an old address, or when customer service asks them to confirm details they thought they had already given.
Show the delivery address the wallet supplied on the confirmation page and in the confirmation email, clearly, with an easy way to correct it before the order ships. A shopper who spots an old address within a minute of paying can fix it. One who spots it after the parcel has gone back to the depot becomes a support case and a delayed order.
Test the button route as its own checkout
Place a real order through each buy button you offer, on a phone, as a shopper with no account at your shop. Count every screen between the tap and the confirmation, and write down every question asked after the wallet sheet closes. Then open the order in your back office and check that name, address, house number, phone and email arrived where your logistics expect them. Remove or postpone every post-wallet question you cannot justify, and report conversion for the button route separately from the ordinary checkout, so you can see whether the shortcut is actually shorter.
Sources: paymentsjournal.com, pymnts.com, betaalvereniging.nl and ideal.nl
