What Actually Reduces Checkout Costs and Cart Abandonment

September 1, 2026 at 07:00 AM

What Actually Reduces Checkout Costs and Cart Abandonment

Our homepage says merchants typically save up to 25% on transaction fees by optimizing their payment mix. That is a striking number, and it raises an obvious question: what actually drives it? Over the past year we have published four separate data studies, each looking at a different piece of checkout behavior: what happens when a payment fails, why half of shoppers switch away from the default method, why carts get abandoned in the first place, and how basket size changes what "the right payment method" even means.

Looked at individually, each study is a useful data point. Looked at together, they make the same case from four different angles: cost and conversion aren't a trade-off you have to choose between. The lever that moves both is the mix of payment methods you offer, and how deliberately you configure it.

The abandonment problem is bigger than "add PayPal"

The baseline is stark. Citing Baymard Institute data, our own cart abandonment research puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.19%, roughly seven in ten online shoppers leave without buying. Two of the five reasons we identified are directly about payment: 27% of European shoppers abandon if their preferred payment method isn't available, and unexpected costs at checkout (which often means a payment method's fees showing up late in the flow) account for 48% of abandonments on their own.

That second number matters for the cost side of this too. A checkout that hides fees until the last step doesn't just lose the sale, it damages trust for the next visit. Merchants who show the real cost of each payment option upfront, and who can adjust which options they surface, are solving both problems with the same fix.

Half your customers are actively rejecting your default

The default payment method carries more weight than most merchants assume, and our data on payment switching shows why that's risky: 50.68% of shoppers actively switch away from whatever is pre-selected. That's not a rounding error, it's roughly half of every checkout session making a deliberate choice to look for something else.

The same research cites Baymard findings that 11% of shoppers abandon entirely if their preferred method isn't available, and that adding more relevant options can lift checkout completion by up to 30%. Put together with the abandonment data above, the pattern is consistent: a narrow, one-size-fits-all set of payment options is quietly taxing both your conversion rate and, because you're not offering shoppers a genuinely cheaper option when one exists, your cost base.

The "right" payment method depends on what's in the basket

It's tempting to treat "best payment method" as a single answer. Our basket-size research shows it isn't: Apple Pay outperforms manual card entry for baskets under 250 euros, where speed matters more than anything else, while BNPL usage rises sharply once a basket crosses that 250 euro threshold, when shoppers start treating the purchase as a financial decision rather than an impulse buy.

Our refund data backs this up from a different angle. Refunds are a reasonable proxy for order value, and across every market we could check, wallets and mobile payment apps consistently produced the smallest refunds (as low as a third of the card average), while card and BNPL produced the largest. Indexed against card in Sweden: PayPal at 81, BNPL at 68, wallet at 57, mobile payment at 32. A checkout tuned for one basket size, or one payment method, is by definition mistuned for every other basket size that passes through it.

A failed payment isn't a lost sale, if the right fallback is there

The most operational of the four studies looks at what happens after a payment fails. Our failed-payment research, based on more than 31,500 recorded retries, found that shoppers don't sit and think about it: the median time between a failed first attempt and a successful retry is just under two minutes. When a BNPL attempt fails, 41% of shoppers complete with a mobile payment app instead; when a wallet fails, 59% typically complete with a card. Card failures spread almost evenly across four different fallback categories, meaning merchants who only offer one alternative to card are leaving a predictable share of recoverable sales on the table.

The practical implication is direct: the checkout that recovers the most revenue isn't the one with the fewest declines, it's the one that gives a shopper a genuinely different, fast, low-friction way to try again, immediately, without a reload or a new page.

Why this is a payment mix problem, not a single-provider one

Every one of these four findings points at the same underlying fix: no single payment method, and no single provider, is right for every shopper, every basket size, or every failure scenario. Getting this right means running several payment methods and providers simultaneously and adjusting which ones are shown, and in what order, based on market, cart value, and customer type. That is a payment orchestration problem, and it's the specific problem Briqpay's Payment Integration Platform is built to solve: connect any provider through one API, configure the rules once, and adjust the mix in real time without a checkout rebuild every time something changes.

It's the same pattern that shows up in Briqpay's own case studies. 8848 Altitude boosted conversion by 15% and reduced transaction costs by 20% after moving to Briqpay, not by picking one better payment method, but by being able to run and optimize a mix of them.

The takeaway

If your checkout still shows the same fixed set of payment methods to every shopper regardless of basket size, market, or what happened on their last attempt, you're very likely paying for it twice: once in abandoned carts, and once in avoidable transaction fees. The data across all four studies says the fix isn't a single new payment method. It's the ability to run several, deliberately, and change the mix as the evidence changes.

Want to see what optimizing your own payment mix could look like? Compare the payment methods Briqpay supports or get in touch to talk through your checkout data.