• Stripe now provides businesses with access to more than 100 global payment methods.
  
• Stripe becomes the first payments platform to let users run A/B tests to compare payment methods in their checkouts.
  
• New features help businesses improve conversion rates and boost revenue.
  

SAN FRANCISCO AND DUBLIN—Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today added new features to its optimized checkout suite to help users increase their revenue by making it easier for their customers to complete a purchase.

The optimized checkout suite consolidates years of Stripe research into a set of products, tools, and features that businesses can integrate into their customer journey with minimal engineering effort. Today’s upgrades—which constitute the single largest bundle of new payments optimizations from Stripe to date—offer vastly more payment method choice for consumers, an easy way for businesses to support the top one-click checkouts, and the industry’s first no-code A/B testing tool for businesses to evaluate how different payment methods perform.

“What is the perfect checkout experience? It’s one where any legitimate customer, anywhere in the world, can complete a purchase in just a few seconds using their preferred payment method—and which requires minimal engineering effort from a business to build or maintain. That ideal may not quite exist yet, but thanks to the efforts of thousands of payments engineers at Stripe, we’re getting closer by the day,” said Abhinav Tiwari, product lead for Stripe’s optimized checkout suite.

The optimized checkout

The optimized checkout suite allows businesses to offer their customers a superb checkout experience without having to build it themselves. It combines pre-built UIs with accelerated checkout options, a wide range of payment methods, and controls that allow businesses and platforms to quickly fine-tune the checkout experience for their customers.

New features of the optimized checkout suite include:

• Access to more than 100 payment methods, now including RevolutPay, Mobile Pay, US bank transfers, and Swish. Additionally, the optimized checkout suite dynamically presents customers with the most relevant payment methods from among more than 40 options, using algorithms trained on billions of data points. For example, the Payment Element suggests Cartes Bancaires to Parisians buying goods in Japan, but Konbini to Tokyoites buying locally.

• An A/B testing tool‎ that allows businesses to rigorously identify the best-performing payment methods in their checkout and make data-driven improvements over time. Creator platform Thinkific found through an A/B test that offering buy now, pay later increased average order value by 36%. This is a first-of-its-kind feature: Stripe is the only payments platform to offer a no-code A/B testing tool for payment methods.

• The Express Checkout Element, which allows users to display multiple one-click payment buttons (such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Link) with a single component. Payment methods are dynamically presented in the order most relevant to a customer, showing only the ones supported by the device or the browser a customer is using. Research shows that businesses with Link enabled see a meaningful boost in conversion.

Multi-channel fashion retailer River Island adopted the optimized checkout suite in order to help modernize its fragmented payments system and display the most relevant payment methods for customers around the globe. Soon after implementation, River Island saw a 3% improvement in its credit card authorization rates, and anticipates significant revenue gains this coming year.

“Over the first 12 months of our partnership with Stripe, we will capture millions more value in sales than we previously would have,” said Emily Haddrell, digital product lead at River Island.

Last-mile revenue opportunities

The internet is riddled with bad checkouts: a shocking number of purchase flows underperform both consumer expectations and business needs. Stripe research found that 99% of the leading ecommerce sites make five or more basic errors in their checkout, impeding the ability of customers to complete a purchase. Sixty percent of online shoppers said they’ll abandon a checkout that requires more than two minutes to complete—the average checkout takes more than three—and 85% of consumers said they would do the same if their preferred payment method were not offered.

Stripe research found that businesses that migrated from an older Stripe integration (the Card Element) to the optimized checkout suite saw a 10.5% increase in revenue.

The optimized checkout suite is available globally, and will expand to include more products and features over time. Businesses interested in improving their payment conversion and increasing their revenue can learn more here.