The checkout tasks your team no longer notices are the ones shoppers find hardest
Signing in, creating an account, typing an address and entering payment details are the most ordinary tasks in any checkout. They are also the tasks the people who build and run a checkout stop seeing, because they have done them hundreds of times. Shoppers see them very differently, and that difference is worth more attention than the next feature on the roadmap.
A survey published in April 2025 puts figures on that difference. Forrester Consulting, commissioned by PayPal, questioned 2,002 consumers in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom who had bought something online in the previous month, and 553 decision-makers at retailers in the same three countries who are responsible for ecommerce operations and payment methods. Fieldwork ran in March 2025. Between 37% and 39% of the consumers called each of four basic tasks somewhat challenging or challenging: signing in, creating an account, entering shipping information and entering payment information. Among the merchants, between 8% and 12% thought their customers found the same tasks hard.
The two groups were not asked the same question. Consumers rated checkouts on ecommerce sites in general, merchants rated the checkout on their own site. The gap is therefore not a measurement of any one shop. It does show how differently the two sides see the same steps, and it points to a blind spot most teams share.
The people closest to the checkout use it least like a shopper
There are ordinary reasons why a checkout team underrates its own forms. The team knows every field and what it expects. Its browsers are logged in, autofilled and usually on a desktop. Test orders follow the route that was designed, with valid data typed by someone who has done it a hundred times. None of that resembles a shopper on a phone, filling in an address with a house number addition, a field label that is unclear, and a keyboard that covers the button.
Standard reporting reinforces the blind spot. A funnel shows how many shoppers leave each step, not how much effort the ones who stayed had to put in. A shopper who corrected the postcode twice, retyped a card number and still ordered counts as a conversion. That shopper’s experience is invisible in the conversion rate, yet it is exactly what the survey respondents describe.
Shoppers want fewer questions, not another option
One finding looks contradictory at first. Creating an account before checkout ranked as the top challenge consumers face, yet fewer than a quarter of them said they find guest checkout important. The two answers fit together once you stop thinking in feature names. Shoppers do not ask for a guest checkout option. They ask not to be stopped by an account form. Asked which checkout features matter most, they put the automatic filling of personal information first and of shipping information second, and 73% said keeping the number of steps to a minimum matters to them, rating it important or extremely important.
That shifts the work from adding things to removing them. Every question your checkout asks, and every field the shopper has to type that the browser or a lookup could have filled, is a task in the survey’s list. A guest route that still asks for a password, a phone number nobody uses or the billing address twice is a guest route only in name.
The sample needs one adjustment for a Dutch shop. It covered the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, where 51% of the consumers named a credit or debit card as their preferred way to pay online. In the Netherlands most online purchases are paid with iDEAL, so most Dutch shoppers do not type payment details at all. The typing in a Dutch checkout sits in the address, the email and the account, which is where your attention should go first.
The survey was commissioned by a wallet provider. Its conclusion recommends guest checkout tools from trusted brands, and PayPal presents the findings alongside its own accelerated checkout. Those products only help the shoppers who use them. The gap between what shoppers struggle with and what merchants see applies to every route through your checkout, including the one most of your customers take.
Measure the effort in your checkout, not only its completion rate
The cost of that effort does not stop at one order. Faced with a poor checkout, 70% of the consumers said they would go and buy the product elsewhere, 67% that their opinion of the brand or site would suffer and 59% that they would be less inclined to order there again. These are stated intentions, not measured behaviour, and the merchants drew the same link from their side: 66% connected a successful checkout with revenue and growth.
Close the gap with data your team cannot argue away. Most analytics and form tools can record, per field, how often an error message appears, how often a shopper changes a value after leaving the field and how long the field takes to complete. Add a count of orders in which the shopper saw at least one error before paying. These numbers make visible what the conversion rate hides.
Then watch five people who have never ordered from you complete a purchase on their own phones, without help and without saved details. Note every moment they hesitate, retype or ask what a field means.
Start this month with the error log. Rank your checkout fields by how often they trigger an error message, take the top three and rewrite the label, the format the field accepts or the message itself. Check the ranking again a month later. The fields at the top of that list are where your shoppers have been struggling, and your team has probably been looking past them.
Sources: paypalobjects.com, paypal.com and betaalvereniging.nl
