More insights
Co-founder Briqpay
September 16, 2026 at 07:00 AM
For years, "make checkout faster" has been the default answer to almost every conversion question a merchant asks. Autofill, one click purchasing, guest checkout, fewer fields on the page, it is a well worn playbook, and most merchants have followed it closely.
So we looked at our own B2C checkout data across more than a dozen markets to ask a simple question: is speed still the thing that separates a good checkout from a bad one?
It isn't. Not anymore, and not by market.
We measured how often a customer's billing details are captured instantly, the moment they reach that step, instead of typed in by hand. It is the same measure we used in our earlier study of consumer checkout speed and autofill. Across every market we looked at with a meaningful volume of consumer checkouts, the instant share sits in a strikingly narrow band.
Even the slowest market in our data is still instant for roughly 98 out of every 100 shoppers. Browser and device autofill has done its job so thoroughly that speed, on its own, barely differentiates one market from another anymore, let alone one checkout from another. If your checkout strategy is still built around shaving milliseconds off the billing step, you are optimizing a problem that Chrome, Safari and every password manager in between have already solved for you.
That was the surprising part. We expected more spread across markets with very different levels of smartphone and browser adoption. What we found instead was a ceiling almost everyone has already hit.
Once speed stopped being interesting, we looked at what customers in each market were actually doing at checkout. Not how fast, but with what. That is where the real differences showed up.
Take four large markets side by side.
Germany. Wallets are the default. The large majority of consumer checkouts run through a wallet, with card, invoice and buy now pay later making up smaller, fairly even slices. That lines up with what industry reporting on German payment habits has found too. Germany has long favored invoice and wallet style payments over card first checkouts, a legacy of the country's cash and invoice culture carrying over into digital habits.
Netherlands. Bank transfer leads by a wide margin, roughly half of all checkouts, well ahead of card. This is consistent with how dominant iDEAL is in the Dutch market generally, with industry estimates putting iDEAL's share of Dutch online payments as high as 70%, making it close to a default, not just an alternative.
Sweden. Buy now pay later and mobile payment together account for the large majority of checkouts, with card a distant third. Given Klarna's home market strength and Swish's near universal adoption among Swedish consumers, this pattern likely will not surprise anyone who has shopped online in Sweden, though seeing it quantified at this scale is still striking.
US, UK, France, Denmark. Card is dominant in all four, but the size of that lead, and what fills the rest, differs by market. Wallets take a meaningfully larger share in the UK and US than they do in France or Denmark, and buy now pay later shows up as a real slice of UK checkouts in a way it barely does in France.
Zoom out further and the pattern holds across every market we looked at, no countries have the same payment mix. That echoes what we found in the payment methods that dominate European markets and in what refund data reveals about how shoppers pay.
Here is the uncomfortable implication for a lot of merchant checkout strategies. A checkout that quietly assumes card first, or offers the same payment lineup everywhere, is not a neutral default. It is a bet against the actual preferences of several of your markets, and in some of them, it is a bet you are likely losing before the customer even sees a product.
Speed problems are visible and easy to rally around. A slow checkout gets noticed, measured and fixed. Payment preference mismatches are quieter. Nothing breaks. Nothing errors out. The checkout simply becomes a little less relevant to the customer standing in front of it, market by market, and that shows up as a small, steady tax on conversion that is much harder to trace back to its cause than a slow page load.
This is not just intuition. Stripe's own analysis of more than 50 payment methods found that businesses offering at least one additional payment method relevant to the customer's market saw a 7.4% lift in conversion rate and a 12% lift in revenue on average, with the effect climbing sharply higher in markets where a single local method dominates. iDEAL in the Netherlands alone was worth a 39% conversion increase when offered. The pattern generalizes well beyond any one method or market too: 94% of cross-border shoppers expect to pay in their local currency, and 99% want to use their preferred, customary payment method. Preference, not speed, is where a checkout still has room to lose a sale.
The merchants who treat checkout as something that gets localized market by market, not just translated, are optimizing for the variable that still actually moves: relevance, not raw speed. It is the same conclusion our data reached on what actually reduces checkout costs and cart abandonment: the lever is payment mix.
Autofill and modern browsers have already won the speed race almost everywhere. The next real advantage in checkout is not making it faster. It is making sure the payment options in front of a customer in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Stockholm actually reflect how people pay in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Stockholm, not a single global default that happens to work well in one of them. Our payment methods overview shows which local methods are available in each market.
Figures in the speed and payment mix sections are drawn from Briqpay's own consumer (B2C) checkout data across markets with meaningful transaction volume, covering completed checkouts. Payment methods are grouped by category: card, wallet, bank transfer, invoice, buy now pay later and mobile payment. We do not name specific payment providers in this analysis. External figures cited for context, such as iDEAL's market share in the Netherlands or Stripe's conversion research, come from third party sources and are linked at each mention, not treated as confirmation of our own numbers.
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