52% of Consumers Used Stored Debit Credentials for Recent Online Purchases

Stored payment credentials are rapidly overtaking manual entry for eCommerce purchases.

We see the trend clearly in data from a survey of over 2,100 U.S. consumers for the study “How We Pay Digitally: Stored Credentials Edition,” a PYMNTS and Amazon Web Services collaboration, where storing credentials crosses demographic and other boundaries.

“Debit and credit cards enjoy long-term incumbency as the most commonly used type of stored payment credentials,” the study stated, adding that of consumers who made an online purchase in the last 30 days, “52% paid with a stored debit card at least once and 45% used a stored credit card. Meanwhile, just 33% paid with a stored bank account, making this a common but significantly less popular form of stored-credentials payment.”

How and where shoppers are storing credentials is first and foremost a matter of trust and is exhibited in different ways depending on the goods and services being purchased.

As to where consumers are using stored credentials the most at this point, 35% of consumers reported using stored bank account credentials to pay mortgages or rents, “more than those who did so with stored debit or credit cards, at 20% and 11%, respectively.”

Conversely, “less than 10% of consumers pay for groceries, restaurants, retail products or travel services using stored bank accounts, versus between 26% and 39% for debit and credit cards, respectively, depending on the category.”

In the demographic breakdown, those earning over $100,000 annually “paid with stored credit cards much more frequently than their counterparts in the middle- and lower-income brackets, though in all cases, consumers used stored bank accounts less commonly than credit or debit cards,” the study stated.