A year of payment upgrades means little to a shopper who meets the same checkout
In 2023 the payments company Primer surveyed 2,000 consumers and 300 retail businesses in Singapore and published the results under the title Mind the Gap. The retailer half of the survey describes a sector in motion. Of the retailers, 99% had made changes or improvements to their payment set-up in the previous twelve months, a third had added new payment methods, and 37% reported higher sales after widening the choice of payment options and currencies.
The consumer half reads as if little of that work had reached the shopper. Speed and payment choice came out as the main checkout concerns, close to half wanted paying to be quick and simple, and 62% said they would abandon a cart if delivery cost too much. The survey does not say what each retailer changed, but the shopper’s verdict rests on what appears on the screen.
The survey is three years old and covers one market in Asia, so its percentages are no benchmark for a European webshop. The pattern behind them travels better than the numbers. A payment change is work the retailer does. It only closes the gap when the shopper notices a difference at the moment of buying.
The shopper’s verdict includes the delivery charge
The abandonment figure Primer puts on its own report page has nothing to do with payment technology. It is about the delivery charge. Baymard Institute’s survey of US online shoppers, last updated in September 2025, points the same way: among shoppers who abandoned for a reason other than just browsing, 40% named extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees. Two different markets and two different surveys, and in both the delivery charge is one of the main reasons to walk away.
That matters for how you read your own results. A shopper does not separate the payment step from the total shown above it. If the delivery charge first appears on the page where they choose how to pay, a faster payment form or a new method on that same page is judged alongside a surprise. Measure a payment change on a checkout where the total is already known before the first field, or the effect of the change disappears into the effect of the charge.
A new method counts only where the shopper looks for it
Adding a payment method is the change in Primer’s list that a shopper can see most directly. It is also easy to add one in a way that nobody notices. A method placed at the bottom of a long list, folded under a link for more options, or labelled with a technical provider name rather than the brand shoppers know, exists in the configuration and not in the shopper’s experience.
Shoppers who name payment choice as a main concern look for their own method first and decide from there. Order the list by how your shoppers actually pay, per country and per device, and put the most used method at the top. Show the accepted methods in the basket as well, so a shopper knows before entering an address that their way of paying is there. A method the shopper only discovers at the final step is a method they had to doubt for the whole checkout.
Security has to be visible to be counted
Primer’s figures on trust reach beyond the current order. Of the consumers, 87% said they worry about fraud and a quarter had experienced a fraudulent incident online in the past year. Asked about returning to a site, 62% called payment security essential to that decision. Security is therefore part of whether the next order happens, not only this one.
The same survey found that 47% feel more secure when they are asked to confirm a payment through 3D Secure. Read that figure in both directions. It shows that a verification step can reassure a large group of shoppers. It also shows that more than half did not report that comfort, so the step does not reassure by default.
Shoppers cannot see the fraud screening or the encryption behind a checkout. What they see is whether the shop name stays consistent from basket to bank confirmation, whether a redirect to their bank or wallet is announced before it happens, whether the amount in the verification screen matches the total they agreed to, and whether a clear confirmation follows within seconds. A security badge in the footer is not on the screen at the moment of paying. A single line next to the pay button saying what happens next is.
Write the changelog from the shopper’s side
Take every change made to your payment step and checkout in the past twelve months and write it down in one column. In the column next to it, write what the shopper now sees differently, on which step, and on a phone. Some changes will leave the second column empty. They may still have been worth doing, but they did not touch what shoppers say they care about.
Then work on the visible gaps in the order the shopper meets them: the total including delivery before the first checkout field, the order and labels of your payment methods, and what the shopper reads while confirming a payment. Walk through the checkout as a first-time guest on a phone after each change, and record what you see rather than what you configured.
Sources: primer.io, Mind the Gap, primer.io, Singapore findings, baymard.com and paymentexpert.com
