NEW DATA: Buy Buttons Save Consumers 148 Million Hours Each Year at Checkout

Merchants are adding buy buttons— shortcuts to check out via a payment platform that skips the typical “add-to-cart” and payment steps — more quickly than they have since 2018. Nearly three-quarters of all eTailers now offer buy buttons, significantly streamlining the purchase journey. However, PYMNTS data reveals that 30% of merchants force customers to provide personal information to complete buy button checkouts, causing average checkout times to increase and introducing privacy concerns.

For the 2022 Buy Button: Accelerating Checkout Optimization report, PYMNTS conducted a new study of 808 leading online retailers in the U.S. across 17 industry segments and, for the first time in this series, also investigated 200 merchants to examine the state of play for buy button adoption, including related buy now, pay later (BNPL) options, and the key implications of current trends on consumers’ online purchase journeys.

• Buy buttons save U.S. consumers 148 million hours each year when checking out online.

Buy buttons are still squeezing efficiency gains from checkout journeys. In Q2 2022, online shoppers who used a buy button at checkout completed their purchase journeys in roughly half the time it took those who checked out via regular methods.

• Smaller merchants have more buy buttons overall than enterprise merchants, and there is a wide variety seen across industry sectors.

Buy buttons enjoy significantly higher popularity among small eTailers than large ones. Eighty-seven percent of small online merchants support at least one buy button, while only 73% of large merchants do the same.

• Online merchants have introduced friction into the checkout flow that makes the buy button experience less streamlined for consumers.

Thirty percent of the online merchants we surveyed in Q2 2022 required customers who check out using buy buttons to provide personal information — nearly three times as many as in Q4 2020.

The 2022 Buy Button Report: Accelerating Checkout Optimization examines the state of play for buy button adoption, including related BNPL options, and the key implications of current trends on consumers’ online purchase journeys.

To learn more about how buy buttons are impacting purchase journeys in 2022, download the report.