Payment choice at checkout is now a loyalty lever
Merchants who treat payment method selection as a back-office afterthought are handing customers a reason to leave. Research from PYMNTS, based on a simulation across 510 leading merchants and a consumer panel of more than 2,100 respondents, makes the relationship explicit: 13% of online shoppers say a lack of payment options is enough to send them to a competitor. That is not a marginal finding. At scale, it represents a material slice of revenue walking out the digital door.
Two other data points deserve attention from Dutch and Belgian merchants. First, the average time consumers spent browsing before reaching the payment step rose 24% quarter on quarter, from 145 to 179 seconds. Longer browse times combined with any friction at the payment stage compounds drop-off risk: a customer who has already invested nearly three minutes is not more forgiving, they are more impatient. Second, the overall Checkout Conversion Index declined slightly between Q1 and Q2 2021, while the share of merchants offering free shipping fell from 74% to 63%. Both signals point in the same direction: merchants are reducing features at exactly the moment consumers are raising expectations.
For merchants operating in the Benelux market, the implication is practical. iDEAL remains the dominant method in the Netherlands, while Belgian shoppers skew toward Bancontact, but both markets show growing appetite for wallets, BNPL, and stored-credential flows. Offering only one or two payment methods is no longer a neutral position; it is an active friction point. The loyalty dimension matters equally: a checkout experience that feels tailored and smooth creates a positive association with the brand, not just the transaction.
The concrete action here is an audit. Map every payment method your customers expect against what you actually present at checkout, then measure drop-off at the payment step specifically. Conversion tools built into most modern platforms make this straightforward. Close the gap between expectation and reality, and loyalty follows.
Source: pymnts.com
