International Checkout and Payment Methods: Where Your Expansion Wins or Loses Money
10% of cart abandonments are caused by missing payment methods, 21% by slow delivery. The statistics and country specifics to optimize your international checkout.
Laura Dominguez, co-founder LDMM Agency
7/25/20262 min read
When an international expansion underperforms, teams often look first at the marketing: the wrong targeting, the wrong creative or the wrong channel.
In our experience, however, one of the costliest weaknesses often sits much further down the funnel: at checkout.
Cart abandonment figures worth knowing
Baymard Institute, one of the most widely cited sources on checkout usability, currently puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.19%.
Some of these abandoned baskets are unavoidable. Customers may simply be browsing, comparing prices or saving products for later.
But among the more actionable reasons identified in Baymard’s latest US survey, 20% of respondents cited delivery that was too slow, while 9% said that there were not enough payment methods available.
Those figures may sound modest until you compare them with the traffic you are paying to acquire.
Every visitor who reaches the checkout through a paid campaign has already generated acquisition costs. Losing them at this stage means paying for demand that never becomes revenue.
Payment preferences vary by country
This is where localization becomes particularly tangible.
According to the EHI’s Online Payment 2025 study, based on German online retail revenue in 2024, PayPal accounted for 28.5% of revenue and invoice payments for 25.8%. Direct debit represented a further 17.3%, while credit cards and international debit cards accounted for 12.3%.
The payment landscape looks different elsewhere. In France, for example, 89% of surveyed online shoppers said they used card payments for online purchases.
These figures use different methodologies and should not be compared directly. But they illustrate an important point: payment habits differ significantly from one market to another.
A brand that rolls out a card-first checkout in Germany does not automatically exclude most customers. It may, however, create unnecessary friction by failing to offer payment methods that account for a substantial share of local online revenue.
And the underlying cause may not be immediately visible in a standard marketing dashboard.
Delivery and returns: the other potential deal-breakers
Payment is only one part of the checkout experience.
Expectations around delivery times, shipping costs and returns are shaped by the standards customers know from their own market – not by those of your home market.
A delivery promise that feels reasonable in one country may appear uncompetitive in another. What matters is not only speed, but also clarity.
Customers should be able to see when their order is expected to arrive, how much delivery will cost and what will happen if they need to return it.
The same applies to returns. The timeframe, costs and process should be explained clearly and in the customer’s language.
Uncertainty at checkout creates friction. And friction increases the risk of abandonment.
Want to understand where your checkout may be losing revenue in your target markets?
That is often where we begin an international eCommerce audit at LDMM Agency.
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