By the numbers: Less than half (44%) of US merchants believe their payment service provider (PSP) makes the user experience during checkout easy and convenient, per a PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard study.

15% of merchants said this was the most important feature a PSP can provide.

Why this matters: Ensuring customers have a seamless checkout experience is crucial. A difficult or time-consuming checkout process leads to customers abandoning their carts.

• 50% of consumers weigh the ease of a merchant’s checkout process when deciding where to shop, per PYMNTS Intelligence.
• Pain points include having to manually enter their card details, not remembering their login, or not having their preferred payment method available.

Given that it can make or break customer conversion, this level of merchant distrust that their providers can help them achieve a seamless experience could hurt providers’ retention.

What providers can do: To better help merchants improve the ease of their checkout experience, providers should invest in the features merchants think they’re still missing.

More than half (55%) of US merchants said they have requested new technologies from the PSPs, per the study.

• The most requested feature was one-click solutions, which 45% of US merchants asked their PSPs for.
• More than one-quarter of merchants requested adding secure card on file capabilities.
• And 25% requested biometric authentication.

Our take: If payment providers can add these features—and make them easy to integrate—it should help boost merchant satisfaction and help them grow their networks.

Offering the most in-demand features will be especially crucial moving forward as point-of-sale (POS) competition heats up. As the lines blur between different types of payment providers, more providers are offering POS software, growing the crowd of competitors.

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