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Do Mobile Payments Mean No More Checkout Forms?

May 31, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Mobile payments are streamlining a lot of processes together to make things easier for the user, and that in turn is making people turn to mobile payments much more often.

An unexpected casualty of this is the checkout form, which is almost, essentially, being streamlined out of existence.

Since the use of mobile payment systems is effectively making payment one-touch easy on most payment apps, the end result is that there’s not a whole lot of call for a checkout form, at least when people shop on mobile devices.

That’s got some people thinking that maybe such a measure should be that easy everywhere, and already, the checkout form is under fire on other platforms like desktop PC.

With mobile shopping quite clearly dominant—an eMarketer study says 58 percent of mobile sales were generated by smartphones in 2016—and likely to grow in the interim, taking cues from smartphone shopping will likely be useful on other platforms.

Though other platforms like desktop PC will still be part of the picture for quite some time to come, the smartphone is shaping the market and might ultimately serve as the new gold standard.

Can such a move be made on other platforms? Is it possible to draw cues from the mobile shopping experience for use elsewhere? While it may not be an exact port, some believe that making a”frictionless experience” of the kind commonly seen on mobile devices might ultimately be beneficial for all retailers regardless of platform. After all, many report abandoning online shopping items thanks to cumbersome shipping forms, so if the shipping forms are gone then perhaps so too is the abandonment.

With customers increasingly storing payment information to local devices, the importance of establishing security on these devices likewise increases. If hackers know that payment data is on devices, then these become targets, and the perfect potential hacking vector.

It’s the eternal compromise between security and convenience, and it’s possible that the checkout form is the next victim. Streamlining order processes improves the chances that orders will be placed, but a process made too simple is unsafe by comparison. The checkout form’s ultimate fate remains to be seen, but we could be looking at a very different world to come, one based on mobile payments.