74% of Europeans won’t reduce online shopping

During the lockdowns of last year, 96 percent of consumers in Europe shopped online. That’s up from 60 percent one year earlier.

Three in four European consumers (74 percent) say they will stick to their pandemic online shopping levels, meaning they won’t reduce their ecommerce activities now they can shop offline again. So it looks like the shift to ecommerce is here to stay.

According to ‘the New State of Retail‘, a report from Checkout.com, among over 10,000 consumers and 500 online retailers, 43 percent of retailers said they weren’t prepared for last year’s surge in cross-border payments across Europe. They didn’t have the necessary payment methods in place to capture the demand from new markets within Europe. This resulted in lost revenue.

At the same time, 80 percent of consumers expect to pay using new payment methods such as Buy Now Pay Later, crypto, and digital wallets. And 30 percent say they now actively want to try new payment methods based on their digital payment experiences last year. One in eight consumers used a new digital payment method for the first time.

The report also takes a look at opportunities for online retailers. Laser-localized payments should lead to an optimized revenue, but there are still some localization performance pain points.

74 percent of online retailers don’t offer all payment pages in the local language. And two in three don’t offer local payment methods in every country they serve.

And 83 percent of ecommerce merchants are without direct access to a local acquirer in every key market that they operate within. “This can negatively impact approval rates”, the authors suggest.