The 70% problem: Why checkout is still where eCommerce goes to die

Roughly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before completion. That figure has barely shifted in a decade, despite billions invested in eCommerce platforms, payment gateways, and user experience optimisation. The technology has improved dramatically. The abandonment rate has not.

Checkout remains the point where eCommerce momentum dies.

The reasons are well documented. Customers are asked to create accounts. They enter card numbers, expiration dates, security codes. They navigate authentication challenges. Each step introduces friction, and friction kills conversion. The merchants who solve this problem gain measurable competitive advantage. The question is how.

The wallet trade-off

Digital wallets from major tech platforms have offered one answer. Store your credentials once, authenticate with biometrics, complete purchases with a single tap. The user experience is genuinely superior. But for merchants and financial institutions, this convenience comes with trade-offs. Transaction data flows through third-party systems. Customer relationships become mediated by platform intermediaries. Fee structures are dictated by providers with significant market power. Banks lose visibility at the moment of purchase, precisely when customer engagement matters most.

The underlying question: can merchants and banks deliver wallet-quality checkout experiences without ceding control to third-party platforms?

Tokenisation changes the equation

The shift now underway is built on tokenisation - replacing sensitive card credentials with secure, device-linked references that can authenticate transactions without exposing underlying payment data. This is not new technology. What is new is its application to the checkout experience itself.

Standards like EMVCo's Click to Pay enable single-click checkout using tokenised cards. The checkout experience for consumers is straightforward: add items to the cart, choose a card linked in the Click to Pay profile, and complete the payment. No manual card entry. No account creation friction. No repeated security challenges. The difference is in the infrastructure. Payment credentials remain with the issuing bank. Transaction data stays within established banking relationships. Merchants gain conversion benefits without routing customers through third-party platforms.

The security case

Beyond conversion, tokenised checkout addresses a persistent security challenge. Card-not-present fraud remains the dominant vector for payment crime. When credentials are replaced by device-bound tokens, the attack surface shrinks dramatically. Stolen token data is useless without the specific device context. Fraud rates drop. Chargeback costs fall. The security improvement is structural, not incremental.

For merchants operating across multiple markets, there is an additional consideration. Tokenised checkout solutions built on global standards work consistently across borders, without requiring separate implementations for each jurisdiction. The same infrastructure serves domestic and international customers. Click to Pay is supported by all major international card schemes, as well as several progressive domestic networks such as Cartes Bancaires in France and eftpos in Australia.

What this means for merchants

The merchants seeing results from tokenised checkout share common characteristics. They have integrated payment authentication into the purchase flow rather than treating it as a separate step. They offer multiple payment options while making the fastest path clearly visible. They measure checkout completion rates with the same rigour they apply to earlier funnel stages.

The 70% abandonment rate is not inevitable. It reflects checkout experiences designed around payment system constraints rather than customer behaviour. The technology to close that gap now exists: EMVCo's globally standardized Click to Pay checkout solution, which is steadily scaling into production. The merchants and financial institutions that deploy it effectively will capture value that has been leaking from eCommerce since its inception.