Streamline Your Guest Checkout Experience Now to Drive Holiday Sales

While shopping online for your son’s holiday gift, you stumble across a cashmere scarf from an unfamiliar retailer. You’re checking out as a new customer, and the site requests your contact, shipping, billing, and payment information. You don’t have your credit card number handy, so you leave the checkout frustrated—without buying the scarf.

Sales are lost in scenarios like this all too frequently. In fact, the average online shopping-cart abandonment rate is higher than 70%, according to the Baymard Institute.

Shoppers don’t finish checking out for a variety of reasons, including:

• The requirement to create an account

• A lack of trust around payment information security

• A long, complicated checkout process

To convert new or existing customers, businesses cannot overlook the guest checkout experience—particularly around the holiday season, when guest-shopper traffic is highest.

Improving Guest Checkouts

Simply offering guest checkout is not enough to improve customer experience. Guest shoppers still need to complete multiple form fields, which makes the process notoriously cumbersome. Businesses that invest in speeding up and easing this experience can convert more customers.

A streamlined guest checkout process should offer:

• Early guest recognition that can quickly identify shoppers and their payment preferences

• Pre-filled customer information that automatically supplies a shopper’s email address and payment, shipping, and billing information

• Checkout speed that allows shoppers to finalize transactions in as little as one click

Sixty-six percent of customers expect to check out in four minutes or less, according to Capterra, and each innovation can shave precious time off the checkout experience. Taken together, these improvements can help a business drive conversion and deliver an ideal shopping experience for all customers.

Speed Powered by Data

The key to fast guest checkout is data, including access to information about customers’ purchase history, credentials, and payment information.

“The ability to recognize verified shoppers is what makes a fast, one-click guest checkout experience possible. And it’s only possible with the right breadth and depth of data,” says Mike Sutter, SVP and head of checkout at PayPal. “You need the scale and trust of a large network to truly accelerate the process.”

Ensuring customer trust around data is equally important. Customers aren’t comfortable giving their personal information to just anyone. A majority will only buy from companies that have a reputation for protecting data, according to McKinsey. Businesses need to align with payment service providers known for taking data privacy seriously.

More Checkouts, More Conversion

A speedy checkout doesn’t just enable a convenient buyer experience. It can also lead to more completed checkouts, lower cart abandonment rates, improved authorization rates, and higher conversion rates. Importantly, it can also drive higher customer satisfaction, which can encourage customers to return.

The concept of a high-speed guest checkout isn’t new. Solutions are already available. But they all differ in the scale of their data network and their access to it.

Fastlane by PayPal is the only accelerated guest checkout solution that is powered by the scale and credibility of PayPal’s immense network, with 550 million cards securely stored. Businesses that use Fastlane can recognize shoppers and let them pay in seconds.

“Effective guest checkout solutions should balance ease of use with robust security measures,” says Sutter. “By recognizing returning customers and allowing for quick, one-click payments, businesses can create a smoother, more satisfying shopping experience.”

The holidays are just around the corner, and guest traffic is about to soar. A high-speed guest checkout may be the make-or-break element of the season. Now’s the time for businesses to examine their checkout processes and consider how they can improve customer experience with an accelerated guest checkout.

Learn more about how PayPal is helping businesses convert shoppers into buyers with a fast, simple, and frictionless buying experience.