Thought Leadership
Applause, a provider of software testing and digital quality assurance, has published the results of its first survey on digital payments and localization. The results show that most users stop using apps that are poorly localized or have payment problems.
The impact on business is considerable: 41 percent of respondents have recently had a problem that prevented them from making a purchase.
With German e-commerce sales estimated to exceed 88 billion euros by the end of the year, the success of many companies depends on the quality of their digital offerings. However, despite development teams investing in best practices for localization and payment testing, they are not meeting consumer expectations for transactions via apps and websites.
This was the conclusion reached by more than 6,700 software developers, QA experts and independent consumers worldwide, including 1,614 from Europe. The survey participants were asked about digital payment and localization testing strategies as well as usage behavior and preferences.
The most important results
- 41 percent of consumers have recently encountered a problem with online payments that affected the transaction. – In the US and Europe, companies are missing out on 260 billion US dollars in revenue due to resolvable shopping cart abandonment issues.
Development teams therefore need to focus more on software testing and other quality assurance measures to ensure smooth functionality.
- 76 percent of consumers are likely to abandon a transaction if their preferred payment method is not accepted.
In the EU, this figure is even higher at 78 percent.
According to the survey, credit/debit cards remain the most popular method, preferred by 92 percent of EU consumers, while mobile/digital wallets are close behind at 76 percent.
- Despite the growing demand for mobile/digital wallets, they are not yet accepted everywhere.
62 percent of software and quality assurance experts state that customer preferences are the decisive factor in determining which payment methods are accepted.
In the EU, only 41 percent of them accepted mobile/digital wallets.
- Developers focus on localization but continue to test on a dogfooding basis, limiting coverage and leading to bias.
While 66 percent of companies surveyed are working to adapt their customer journeys and checkout processes to regional and cultural norms, more than half (59 percent) rely on internal developers and QA staff who are native speakers to test apps for each language.
- In the EU, 49% of consumers have stopped using an app due to poor localization. Effective localization – especially the accuracy of the translation – is crucial for customer retention. The main localization issues are: Responses used incorrect words or syntax (63 percent), spelling errors (44 percent) and checkout process/workflows seemed out of order (41 percent).
“Choice and speed are of the utmost importance to consumers. If they can’t complete a purchase quickly using their preferred payment method, they won’t continue with it,” says Luke Damian, Chief Growth Officer at Applause.
“Digital payments is a complex landscape. In addition to transaction processing, developers need to think about returns, exchanges, receipts, rewards programs and more. Every aspect of the customer journey is an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is why expanding test coverage through crowdtesting is so important.”
The survey on digital payments and localization is part of Applause’s “State of Digital Quality” series. The third annual State of Digital Quality Report, which analyzes a representative sample of test data and reports on the most common digital experience failures in various industries, will be published in September 2024.
(pd/Applause)
