Online Shoppers' Big Peeve: It's Such a Pain to Pay
What really aggravates people about shopping online? Believe it or not, it's that it isn't easy enough to pay.
Yes, a majority of U.S. shoppers surveyed recently cited having to enter payment, billing and shipping information as a major nuisance of buying on the web.
Instead, 58% of online shoppers said they'd rather safely store their account information once, in a single place that can be easily accessed no matter where they're shopping online, according to the recent MasterCard survey conducted by Harris Interactive, reflecting responses from 2,229 shoppers.
It's clearly a big gripe. We're so irritated by having to enter (and reenter) all our digits that nearly one out of four shoppers abandon their virtual shopping carts at least once a month before completing their purchase, respondents said.
They do so "for a variety of reasons, including the length of the checkout process, or difficulty entering payment and billing information," Geoff Iddison, group executive of e-commerce and mobile for MasterCard, tells DailyFinance.
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No surprise, smartphones only make matters worse. "These difficulties are amplified when a consumer is asked to complete these steps on mobile devices with smaller screens and hard-to-read text fields," he says.
So merchants are mulling ways to streamline the checkout process and help convert browsers into buyers, Iddison says.
Downloadable password management software and apps like LastPass and Dashlane are designed to appeal to online shoppers' impatient with data entry.
Dashlane, which launched last month, highlights its ability to expedite the online checkout process. The free software enables users to store online credentials, such as logins and passwords to websites, personal data, such as name, address and phone number, and financial information, like credit card and debit card numbers, for faster form-filling and auto-logins at any retailers' e-commerce site.
With Dashlane, an online shopper's personal information is filled in quickly and automatically at a retailer's checkout screen, "so that a transaction that usually takes several minutes happens instead in seconds," a Dashlane spokesman tells DailyFinance.
Users' personal data is locally encrypted on their own computer, accessible via a "master password" which no one but the user has access to, and which isn't even stored on Dashlane's servers, the company says.
Sounds like just what all those frustrated online shoppers are looking for. But only time will tell if password-management tools catch on, or result in fewer abandoned shopping carts floating around in cyberspace.
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