Consumer Checkout Speed: What 900,000 Purchases Reveal About Autofill and Your Best Customers

September 9, 2026 at 07:00 AM

What we looked at

We pulled 903,022 completed consumer checkout sessions from Briqpay's own transaction data, with internal test transactions excluded (a little under 1.5% of raw volume). Same caveat as always: this dataset skews heavily toward Sweden and the wider Nordics, so treat the exact numbers as directional rather than a precise UK or global benchmark, though as you'll see below, the core finding held up remarkably well across every market we could check, including the UK, US, Australia, and Canada.

For each session we measured the time between two funnel events: the moment a shopper first interacts with the billing/address step of checkout, and the moment their billing details are captured. That gap is the best proxy we have in the data for "how long did this person spend actually entering their details."

The headline finding: checkout fills itself for almost everyone

Here's the number that made us go back and re-run the query three times before we believed it: for 99.27% of consumer checkout sessions, that gap rounds to zero seconds. Not "fast." Zero. Even the 90th percentile (the slower nine-tenths of all sessions) still rounds to 0.0 seconds.

At first that reads like a bug. It isn't. When we split sessions into "instant" (the gap is exactly zero) and everyone else, the split is 896,412 instant sessions against 6,605 that took real, measurable time, a little under three-quarters of one percent of all consumer checkouts.

The likely explanation isn't exotic: browser and device-level autofill has become good enough, and consistent enough, that for the overwhelming majority of returning and even first-time shoppers, the browser (or a saved payment profile) fills the address and billing fields faster than any of Briqpay's funnel events can distinguish between them. The form isn't being filled in quickly. For practical purposes, it isn't being filled in by the shopper at all.

This isn't a Sweden thing

Given how much of our dataset comes from Sweden, the obvious first suspicion is BankID: Swedish shoppers are used to identity-verified flows that can pre-populate an address in one tap, and that could easily produce a result like this. So we checked it market by market.

It doesn't hold up. The "instant" share is 99.4% in Sweden, but it's 99.3% in the UK, 99.8% in Australia, 99.7% in Canada, 99.5% in New Zealand, 99.0% in the US, 98.2% in Germany, and 97.2% in Norway. Every market we could check with a meaningful sample size (GB: 46,981 sessions; US: 11,408; AU: 13,572; CA: 5,906) landed in the same 97-99.8% band, and the 90th percentile was 0.0 seconds in literally all of them.

That range is remarkably tight for markets with completely different identity-verification norms, which points to something more universal than BankID: modern browsers and devices now autofill address and payment forms well enough, on enough of the web, that the mechanics of who's issuing the ID card barely move the needle. Chrome's own developer team has published research consistent with this: in a study across millions of form submissions, they found forms are abandoned 75% less often when autofill is used, and the time spent filling them in drops by roughly 35%. What we're seeing in Briqpay's data looks like the sharp end of that same trend: not "autofill helps a bit," but autofill has become the default way consumer checkout forms get filled in at all.

The 1% who still type, and what makes them different

The interesting part of this story isn't the 99.27%. It's the 6,605 sessions (0.73% of the total) where a person visibly typed their information in by hand. For that group, the median time from first touching the address form to having it captured was 36 seconds, and the slowest 10% took over four minutes (245 seconds at the 90th percentile).

We compared average order value between the two groups, and normalized every session into a single base currency first, since the two groups don't share exactly the same currency mix (this matters: a raw comparison would have been misleading). Even after normalizing, the gap held: sessions in the "manual entry" group carried an average order value roughly three times higher than the instant group.

We want to be careful here about what this data can and can't tell us. This is a correlation, not a causal story, and we don't have a way to know from this dataset alone why the relationship exists. A few honest hypotheses, none of them proven:

• Larger, less routine purchases may be less likely to come from a browser profile with saved payment details already on file: a bigger purchase is more likely to be a first-time or infrequent one.
• Some higher-value orders may trigger additional address or identity verification steps behind the scenes, adding real seconds that a low-value, saved-profile purchase never touches.
• Shoppers making a bigger purchase may simply be more deliberate and less likely to blitz through a pre-filled form without checking it.

Whichever combination of these is true, the practical takeaway is the same: the shoppers taking noticeably longer to check out are, on average, your more valuable customers, which raises the stakes on getting their experience right considerably higher than the raw 0.73% session share would suggest.

What the wider research says

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it's worth putting our own numbers next to the broader research on checkout friction. Baymard Institute, which has tracked checkout abandonment across dozens of studies for over a decade, puts the average cart abandonment rate at around 70%, and finds that 17% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter specifically because the checkout process felt too long or too complicated. Separate industry estimates put the value of abandoned online shopping carts at roughly $4 trillion a year globally, with somewhere around $18 billion of that considered recoverable lost revenue, and mobile abandonment running even higher than desktop, north of 75% by some estimates.

The consistent theme across all of this research is that friction (extra fields, extra steps, anything that makes a shopper stop and think) is where checkouts lose people, and where the highest-value transactions are disproportionately at risk. Offering payment methods and identity flows suited to the local market isn't a nice-to-have either: businesses that do it see meaningful lifts, on the order of a 12% revenue increase and a 7.4% boost in conversion rate in some studies.

Our take: build for the 99%, but don't neglect the 1%

Here's where we'll add our own view rather than just the data. If autofill genuinely is filling in the overwhelming majority of consumer checkout forms (and both our numbers and Chrome's own research point the same direction) then the single highest-leverage thing a merchant can do to their checkout form is make sure it plays nicely with autofill in the first place. That sounds obvious, but it's a surprisingly common failure mode: custom-built address fields, unusual field names, single combined "full address" text boxes, and JavaScript-heavy form widgets can all silently break a browser's ability to autofill them, forcing every shopper (not just the 0.73%) into the slow, manual path. Standard HTML input types, sensible autocomplete attributes, and a postal-code lookup as a backup rather than a replacement will get you most of the way there.

The second thing is subtler: don't optimize the checkout experience purely for the median shopper, because the median shopper's form is already filling itself in near-instantly and there's very little friction left to remove for them. The customers actually at risk of abandoning (and, per this data, the ones spending more when they don't abandon) are the small minority stuck typing everything out manually. That argues for treating a slow, actively-being-filled-in checkout session as a signal worth acting on in real time: a saved-cart prompt, a live chat offer, or simply a UI that doesn't time out or throw a validation error the moment someone takes more than a few seconds on a field.

What this means if you sell to consumers

If your own checkout still requires shoppers to hand-type an address every time, you're very likely leaving revenue on the table, not just in raw conversion rate, but specifically among the buyers spending the most. It's worth putting your own numbers next to the picture we've laid out here: what does what refund data reveals about how shoppers pay: cards, wallets and BNPL compared say about how your own customers are actually paying, and does your checkout give them a payment method that plays well with a saved, autofillable profile? We've also written previously about what a year of Nordic checkout data reveals about order value and shopping times, which is a useful companion read if speed and order value are the angle you care about most.

More broadly, this is really a specific data point inside a much bigger picture: what actually reduces checkout costs and cart abandonment covers the wider set of levers (payment method mix, pricing transparency, and checkout design) that determine whether a shopper completes a purchase at all.

A note on methodology

As with all of our data-driven posts, everything here is aggregated and anonymized. We're reporting counts, percentages, medians, and averages across hundreds of thousands of sessions, never a single shopper's or merchant's data, and nothing here can be reverse-engineered to identify an individual purchase. Order values were normalized into a single base currency using each session's recorded exchange rate before we compared groups, specifically so that a difference in currency mix between the "instant" and "manual entry" groups couldn't masquerade as a difference in typical order value. As always, we're a payments company, not a research lab: this reflects the traffic that happens to complete a checkout through our infrastructure, not a scientifically sampled view of all e-commerce, and we've tried to flag every place where that shapes the numbers.