Optimizing delivery and payment : The keys to a high-performing checkout funnel.

At ATI4 Group, we support many clients in developing their e-commerce sites on Magento and Adobe Commerce, and we often observe the same paradox. Our clients invest heavily in traffic acquisition, polish their product pages, optimize their SEO, work on their brand image, but completely neglect the last two stages of the checkout funnel: delivery and payment. It’s like building a perfect highway that ends in a dirt road. All these acquisition efforts lose their meaning if your customers abandon their cart at the crucial moment.

The statistics are striking and reveal the extent of the problem. The average cart abandonment rate in e-commerce is around 70%. This means that out of ten people who add a product to their cart, seven leave without buying. When we analyze the reasons for these abandonments, we find that high shipping costs top the list, closely followed by a payment process that is too complex or that inspires mistrust. These two factors, entirely controllable, explain the majority of missed sales.

The good news is that optimizing these steps does not necessarily require massive investments. It’s more about understanding your customers’ real expectations and removing the friction points that prevent them from completing their purchase. Together, we will explore four essential dimensions to transform your checkout funnel into a true conversion machine.

Delivery as a decisive competitive advantage

A few years ago, delivery was still perceived as a simple logistical obligation, a necessary inconvenience to transport the product from point A to point B. But that era is over. Today, your delivery options are a central element of your value proposition, on the same level as product quality or price competitiveness. This shift is explained by changes in lifestyles and consumer expectations.

Take, for example, an active customer who works all day and has no one at home to receive a package. For them, home delivery is not a convenience but a constraint. They either have to take half a day off to wait for a courier whose exact time of arrival is unknown, or retrieve the package at the carrier’s depot during time slots that often do not match their schedule. Faced with this scenario, they will naturally prefer a site offering delivery to a pickup point near their workplace, where they can collect their parcel at their convenience, including in the evening or on weekends.

The numbers confirm this reality in a spectacular way. More than eighty percent of shoppers say they would abandon their cart if their preferred delivery method were not available. This is not just a matter of preference but a deal-breaker. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of consumers state that delivery options directly influence their choice of merchant site. In other words, with identical products and prices, delivery flexibility makes the difference.

The impact of a poor delivery experience goes far beyond the loss of a single sale. Studies show that nearly 85% of customers will never return to a site after a disappointing delivery experience. A lost package, a major delay without communication, an inability to track their order, and all trust in your brand collapses. Conversely, a flawless delivery strengthens satisfaction and significantly increases the chances of repeat purchases.

To meet these expectations, diversifying your delivery options is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Your offering should ideally include standard home delivery for those who can be present, express delivery for urgent needs, pickup points for flexibility, automated lockers for customers who prefer total autonomy, and possibly click-and-collect if you have physical stores. This variety allows you to cover all customer profiles and situations.

Presenting your delivery options

Once you have implemented several delivery methods, a crucial question arises: in what order should you present them to your customers? This may seem trivial, yet its impact on conversion is considerable. Consumer psychology is unique, and the way you organize choices directly influences purchasing decisions.

The most common approach is to group all out-of-home delivery options into one category, assuming they target the same type of customer. This approach is a mistake. Customers who prefer lockers are not exactly the same as those who prefer pickup points. The former want 24/7 availability and minimal human interaction, while the latter appreciate proximity to a neighborhood shop and are not bothered by standard opening hours.

The optimal order of presentation follows a progressive logic, from the cheapest and most autonomous to the most expensive and most constrained. If you have physical stores, click-and-collect should appear first. This option appeals to those who want their product immediately and with no shipping costs. Next come automated lockers, which offer great flexibility at a moderate cost. Pickup points take the third position, followed by standard home delivery, then express delivery for those willing to pay extra for speed.

This hierarchy is not arbitrary. It reflects a natural thought process that moves from the most practical and economical to the fastest but most expensive. Sites that have implemented this clear differentiation, particularly by visually separating lockers from pickup points instead of grouping them together, have seen conversion increases of up to 12%. This is huge for a simple interface rearrangement.

Beyond the order, the clarity of the information associated with each option plays a major role. For each delivery method, your customers must immediately understand the cost, the time frame, and the practical implications. A pickup point should display an interactive map showing available locations. An automated locker should indicate 24/7 accessibility. Home delivery should specify whether presence is required or if the courier can leave the parcel in a safe place. The more you eliminate uncertainty, the more you reassure and facilitate buying decisions.

3D Secure, the protector turned obstacle

Let’s now talk about payment, and particularly about the step everyone knows: strong authentication, commonly called 3D Secure. On paper, the principle is commendable. It aims to protect online transactions against fraud by asking the cardholder to confirm their identity with a code received by SMS or through their banking app. This extra security should reassure customers and reduce chargebacks.

In practice, 3D Secure has become the main factor of abandonment at the payment stage. The reason is simple: every added friction in the checkout process exponentially increases the risk of abandonment. Imagine the mental path of a customer who has just spent 15 minutes comparing products, has finally found what they were looking for, has entered their delivery information, and is ready to pay. At that moment, they are asked to take out their phone, look for a code that does not always arrive instantly, switch screens, return to the site, and validate again.

Each of these micro-steps is an opportunity for distraction, doubt, or simply irritation. The customer may receive a call while waiting for the code, check their notifications and get caught up in something else, or simply decide that it’s too complicated and that they will come back later… which they never will. Data from payment funnel analyses is unequivocal: 3D Secure now accounts for between 50 and 70% of failed payments on an e-commerce site.

Given these findings, you might be tempted to remove this authentication step entirely. Impossible, because it is regulated by the European PSD2 directive which mandates strong authentication for online payments. The solution lies in what is called smart or adaptive authentication. The principle is to analyze the risk of each transaction in real time and trigger 3D Secure only when truly necessary.

This risk assessment takes many parameters into account: the customer’s history on your site, the transaction amount, the consistency of billing and shipping addresses, the type of product purchased, the time of the transaction, browsing behavior, and many other signals. A loyal customer making their fifth €30 purchase delivered to their usual address presents an almost zero risk. There is no reason to impose strong authentication that will slow and complicate their purchase.

The acceptance rate, the invisible metric that changes everything

Let us continue our exploration of payment with a metric few e-merchants know about but that directly impacts revenue: the acceptance rate. Behind this technical term lies a very concrete reality. It is the percentage of transactions your payment provider validates without triggering strong authentication.

Imagine two identical e-commerce sites: same catalog, same prices, same traffic, same add-to-cart rate. The first uses a payment solution with an acceptance rate of 85%, the second a solution with 95%. Concretely, this means that out of one hundred payment attempts, the first site will impose 3D Secure on fifteen customers, while the second will only trigger it for five. This ten-point difference mechanically translates into additional sales for the second site.

The correlation between acceptance rate and revenue is almost linear. One point of acceptance rate gained represents approximately one point of additional annual revenue. For a site generating one million euros in annual sales, going from an acceptance rate of 90% to 95% can generate €50,000 in additional revenue. This is significant, especially considering that this gain requires no additional traffic acquisition effort.

Not all payment providers are equal on this dimension. Traditional banks generally offer acceptance rates around 85 to 88%. International players like Stripe are usually between 90 and 91%. The best specialized providers, particularly those with structural advantages, can reach rates of 96% to 98%. These technical elements, invisible to the end customer, have a direct and measurable impact on your sales.

User experience at the heart of the payment process

Beyond the technical aspects, user experience during payment deserves special attention. This step is by nature stressful for customers. They are about to provide sensitive information and spend money. Anything that strengthens their trust or simplifies the action improves conversion, while each source of friction or doubt increases the risk of abandonment.

Cost transparency is the first pillar of this trust. Nothing irritates a customer more than discovering unexpected fees at the payment stage. Shipping costs must be clearly displayed as early as possible in the journey, ideally from the product page or at the latest in the cart. If you offer free delivery above a certain amount, clearly show how much the customer is missing to benefit from it. This often encourages them to add an extra product and increases your average cart value.

The variety of payment methods offered also plays an important role. At a minimum, you must accept standard bank cards. But depending on your audience, other options may be relevant. Interest-free installment payments are particularly appealing for medium- to high-value purchases, as they make the purchase psychologically more accessible. E-wallets like PayPal reassure some customers who prefer not to provide their payment details directly to the merchant. Bank transfers may be relevant for B2B transactions.

The simplicity of the payment form also makes a difference. Every field to fill in represents an effort and another opportunity for the customer to make a mistake that will block the transaction. Modern solutions can auto-fill certain information, recognize the card type from the first digits entered, or store returning customers’ details to speed up future purchases. On mobile, where typing is more difficult, this simplification is even more critical.

Reassurance signals are also important. The logo of your payment solution, especially if well-known, reassures customers about transaction security. Mentions like “secure payment,” accompanied by the small padlock symbol, also have a positive psychological effect. If you have certifications or specific guarantees, this is the time to display them. Some sites even show how many customers have purchased securely, creating a reassuring social proof.

Building a checkout funnel that works for you

Throughout these different dimensions of optimizing delivery and payment, a common thread emerges: every friction you remove, every uncertainty you eliminate, every choice you simplify directly translates into additional sales. These optimizations are not about obsessive perfectionism but commercial common sense. You invest to attract visitors to your site, you work hard to convince them of your products’ value; it would be absurd to ruin everything at the last moment by neglecting these final steps.

At ATI4 Group, we systematically integrate these considerations into the e-commerce projects we develop. Magento offers great flexibility to connect various delivery and payment solutions, to customize how options are displayed, and to finely track user behavior. But technology is only a tool serving a strategy. This strategy must start from a deep understanding of your customers: who they are, what constraints they face, what reassures them, what slows them down.

The four lessons we explored are not magical formulas to be applied blindly. They are guiding principles to adapt to your specific context. A site selling bulky furniture will have very different delivery challenges from a clothing site. A site with a high average basket may need to prioritize reassurance and payment method variety, while a low-ticket site will focus on speed and simplicity.

The essential thing is to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. Your competitors are not standing still, your customers’ expectations evolve, and new technical solutions appear regularly. A checkout funnel that performs well today can become obsolete tomorrow if you do not maintain it. Listen to customer feedback, monitor what industry leaders are doing, and don’t be afraid to question what works to test new approaches.

Delivery and payment are no longer technical details you set up once and then forget. They are strategic levers that deserve as much attention and investment as your product catalog or your marketing strategy. The good news is that unlike traffic acquisition, which is becoming increasingly expensive, optimizing your checkout funnel mechanically improves the performance of all your existing traffic. It is one of the rare levers where every euro invested generates a measurable and durable return across your entire business.