When Your Online Checkout Isn’t Smooth And Easy, It’s Your Business That Pays

By Chipo Mushwana, Executive of Emerging Innovation and Payments at Nedbank

Slick interfaces, personalised recommendations, one-hour delivery windows – retailers have brought them all together to make the online shopping experience intuitive and sophisticated. But too often, the moment a customer decides to pay for the goods they want is when the entire experience falls flat.

Cart abandonment rates consistently hover near 70% worldwide and, in South Africa, nearly one in five retailers cite challenges with the checkout process as the reason. These are not hypothetical numbers; they represent real lost revenue, real customer frustration, and a real failure to modernise the most critical part of any online transaction – payment.

The problem is friction. Not just technical glitches, but anything that disrupts the flow, like repeated requests for information, inconsistent user interfaces, delayed OTPs, payment redirects, incompatible digital wallets and clunky QR code experiences. Every step that adds complexity increases the likelihood that the customer will get annoyed and simply give up.

The problem isn’t isolated to a few buggy websites or apps. It reflects a broader failure across the ecommerce ecosystem, where different players, from banks to payment gateways to retailers, haven’t aligned to create a consistent, secure and seamless checkout experience. It’s ironic, since we’ve optimised everything “upstream.” Product discovery, search functions, fulfilment – they all work really well. But checkout largely remains stuck in a model designed for a pre-digital world, patched over with layers of fintech innovation that don’t always play nicely with each other.

Meanwhile, consumer expectations have changed. They expect digital payments to be seamless, authentication to be biometric and the whole checkout process to feel like part of the brand experience – not an outsourced and poorly executed afterthought. When those expectations aren’t met, they don’t just abandon the cart; they also question the credibility of the platform – and potentially the brand too.

Digital wallets offer a compelling alternative. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and others have demonstrated what secure, invisible checkout can, and should, look like – with no card numbers and no OTPs, just a tap and a secure biometric confirmation. These systems are fast, encrypted, and trusted – not just because they’re technically superior, but because they reduce mental effort. And when checkout requires less thinking, more purchases happen.

South Africa is ready for this shift. Smartphone penetration is approaching 90% and consumers are already banking, managing rewards programmes, ordering groceries, airtime and rideshares on their phones. Checkout needs to live in this world of ease and convenience too – natively, securely and without any frustrating friction.

Unfortunately, while the importance of a frictionless checkout process is undoubtedly known by online retailers, adoption still lags. Fragmentation is a key reason for this. QR code systems don’t always work across platforms, banks and fintechs compete rather than collaborate, and many payment providers still operate in silos. Instead of a unified experience, we’ve created a confusing web of apps, redirects and plugins – many of which fail just when consumers need them to work.

Another reason is a lack of trust. Many consumers don’t fully understand what happens when they hand over credentials to third-party providers. Behind the scenes, technologies like screen scraping are still being used, and exposing users to unnecessary risks. However, when fraud happens, the victims almost always turn to their bank first for help, despite the fraudulent financial transaction involving numerous other parties.

That’s why Nedbank is focused on re-intermediation, which involves inserting ourselves back into the heart of ecommerce, particularly at the moment of payment. This isn’t about reclaiming visibility as just a marketing exercise. It’s about reasserting trust at the point of payment, because when financial institutions control the final mile, they can guarantee data protection, enable intelligent authentication and offer recourse when things go wrong.

In the end, the issues with ecommerce checkout are not just technical, they’re strategic. Every abandoned cart is a message that says to the retailer or brand that the customer felt it just wasn’t worth the effort. Brands that understand this will improve conversion, build trust and stay competitive. Those that don’t will keep losing customers at the final step – not because their product is poor, but because their payment process is.