Testing and digital quality solutions provider Applause has released a survey indicating consumers' tendency to abandon a transaction due to limited payment options. The global Digital Payments and Localization Survey conducted by Applause reviewed 6,700 consumers, software developers, and QA professionals, exploring digital payment and localisation testing strategies, as well as user behaviours and preferences.

The company’s research underlined that even if developers invested in best practices, they are still not meeting users' expectations for supporting payments on apps and websites. What did Applause’s survey disclose? As part of the Digital Payments and Localization Survey, Applause revealed that 76% of consumers are likely to abandon a transaction if their preferred payment method is not accepted. In addition, the company’s survey indicated that nearly 68% of consumers prefer to leverage mobile or digital wallets to pay for goods and services, while 56% of providers accept them.

On the other hand, 41% of respondents mentioned that payment issues prevented them from purchasing within the last three months, which negatively impacted retailers, merchants, and other businesses. Moreover, the research discovered that 52% of consumers abandoned an app due to poor localisation, with 48% of app responses leveraging incorrect words or syntax, 40% assuming local knowledge was unfamiliar, and 38% presenting misspellings. Despite centring their efforts on optimising localisation, developers are continuing to test by ‘dogfooding’, a method which limits coverage and introduces bias. Applause mentioned that even if 66% of organisations surveyed stated that they are currently adapting their customer journeys and checkout processes to regional and cultural norms, 59% of them still leverage in-house developers and QA staff who are native speakers to test apps for each language. According to Applause’s officials, considering that the digital payments landscape is complex, developers are required to think about returns, exchanges, receipts, and rewards, in addition to transaction processing.

Also, the company mentions that every aspect of the user journey can be leveraged as an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and retention and expanding test coverage via crowd-testing can further support this. .