Why does a redirection cost conversions?

It adds a step and a page the customer does not recognize. Baymard Institute's research lists a long or complicated checkout and a lack of trust in the site with card details among the main reasons shoppers abandon, and a redirection to an unfamiliar payment page touches both.

Two breaks in one step

A redirection sends the customer from the merchant's site to another page, often on another domain, with another design. Two things happen at once: the checkout gets longer, with an extra page load and an extra context, and the customer is asked to type card details on a page they do not recognize.

What the research says

• Baymard Institute's studies list a long or complicated checkout process among the main reasons shoppers abandon.
• They also list not trusting the site with credit card information.
• A redirection to an unfamiliar payment page touches both at the moment of highest intent.

What to do instead

Keep the customer in the merchant's environment: embedded fields, or a hosted page styled and served so that it looks and feels like the merchant's site. The compliance benefit of a hosted page is preserved; the trust break is removed. For operators, this is a feature of the checkout product, not of each merchant's integration. A platform that offers a brandable hosted page gives every merchant the conversion of an embedded checkout with the PCI scope of a hosted one.