Amazon Wins When Retail Checkout Breaks

When a millennial advertising executive spends 30 minutes on a Sunday morning browsing face serums on a beauty website, she expects that once she lands on her final choice, the hard work is over.

Now all she has to do is click to pay.

But when that last step sends her through endless loops of applying her stored credit card details without success, she quickly bails on the merchant and finds the same product on Amazon. The giant marketplace seals the deal, not the direct-to-consumer retailer.

Digital-first shoppers have little time or patience for online friction. If the checkout process becomes a hassle or doesn’t function at all, shoppers may just abandon their carts and buy elsewhere.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Orchestration Advantage: How Routing Architecture Shapes Payments Performance,” a collaboration with Spreedly, found that when more behind-the-scenes checkout functions are in place and working together, fewer customers leave their carts behind. The report identified five payment orchestration capabilities that help close the sale smoothly, including smart payment routing, systems that automatically recover from failures, updated routing logic, token control and the ability to quickly add payment methods.

Companies that don’t have all these capabilities in place (and thus have weaker checkout systems) are more likely to send frustrated consumers running to competitors. Among businesses with only two or three of the capabilities, 36% reported cart abandonment rates of at least 3%. Among companies with all five tools in place, the “I give up” rate plunges more than twofold, to 16%.

Orchestrate This

Consumers only see a click-to-buy button, but payments orchestration involves more moving parts behind the curtains. The process connects a business’s checkout to payment processors, gateway technologies that transmit payment data, banks and fraud tools through a single integration, then automatically decides in real time which path to send each transaction down based on factors like cost, approval rates, geography, currency and fallback options if the first route fails.

Cart abandonment is a problem for merchants. PYMNTS Intelligence research from 2024 found that millennials reported ditching their shopping carts nearly five times per month on average. Generation Z shoppers reported doing so almost four times monthly.

“Online companies spend an enormous amount of time and energy on attracting customers and convincing them to buy,” Michael Cramer, CEO of Miami-based online tea store Adagio Teas, said in an interview with PYMNTS. “Failing to close the transaction due to a faulty checkout negates all that hard work and expense.”

With so many retailers and product options, winning over shoppers is hard enough. Any glitch at the final step can undermine that effort.

“Checkout is the moment things become real” because the customer has “decided to stop looking around and commit,” Geoff Bowen, head of digital and customer experience at Edenmoor, an online food retailer in the United Kingdom, told PYMNTS. “If something then fails, even outside of the retailer’s control, it can instantly rekindle any lingering doubts and cause them to walk away rather than try again.”

But what’s annoying for consumers can also take a toll on businesses’ bottom lines. The Orchestration Advantage study found that investment in payment orchestration can lead to better revenue outcomes, but only when all five core capabilities are working together.

The core challenge will only compound in difficulty as agentic commerce (shopping handled partly by artificial intelligence assistants and automated systems) becomes more common. The technology may create new payment issues and make it easier for the buyer to switch from one merchant to another.

“As we move further into agentic commerce, bots and consumers alike will simply bounce to another site that can complete the transaction faster and more smoothly,” Shelly Hunter, director of communications and content strategy at digital gift card platform eGifter, told PYMNTS.

Already, agentic shopping tools are becoming more common. Earlier this year, Google introduced agentic commerce functionality for major eCommerce platforms Etsy and Wayfair through its Universal Commerce Protocol. Amazon is also building agentic shopping experiences using Alexa.

As using AI becomes more habitual for consumers, they’re noticing it less and less. Soon, agentic commerce may not feel like some futuristic technology but instead just a routine part of life. That means as AI shopping becomes more common, efficient checkout expectations may rise, too. The report’s data showed that to compete in the world of agentic commerce, firms will need to provide a flexible, unified interface for dozens of payment options. They will also need stronger authentication tools to fight new fraud threats.

It’s tough to overstate the importance of a positive checkout experience. Difficulty at the point of sale creates friction not just by taking up time and effort for consumers but also by eroding their trust.

Saurabh Pitkar, director of product management, agentic commerce at Dell, suggested in an interview with PYMNTS that businesses track relevant metrics, including checkout dropout rates, conversion rates and how long purchases take to complete.

“Checkout friction is absolutely a cause of concern … because it can directly affect the ability to convert transaction intent and future revenue from the same user,” Pitkar said. “Plus, it can have negative network effects if that user posts online about their bad experiences either via a review, blog or video.”

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.