Failed payments from bad gateways are costing WooCommerce stores $2.4 billion/year

David Mainayar on | 3 min read

  • Failed payments arising from issues with major payment gateways PayPal and Stripe are costing WooCommerce stores $2.4bn per year

  • The 2 most popular PayPal and Stripe plugins are used on 49% of WooCommerce stores – and are among the worst-rated of all WordPress plugins

  • 60% of organizations report losing customers as a result of failed payments

Research by PeachPay uncovers the cost of failed payments: WooCommerce stores are losing over $1bn/year as a result of bad integrations with PayPal and Stripe.

The McKinsey 2021 Global Payments Report puts the total value of payments in the global economy at $1.9 trillion per year. Of these, $118 billion (6.21%) are failed payments. It has been reported that WooCommerce handles roughly $40 billion of payments per year.

Failed payments regularly lose WooCommerce stores potential customers: research from ClearSale and Sapio Research found 28% of consumers have experienced having their payment fail when ordering online. Of those, one in three consumers will never place an order with the company again.

A conservative estimate thus places the value of failed payments in WooCommerce at $2.4 billion.

PayPal and Stripe are by far the most popular payment gateways for WooCommerce stores. BuiltWith shows there are 3,672,489 WooCommerce sites. In order to use PayPal or Stripe, you need a payment gateway plugin. The most popular plugins for each platform are:

A total of 1.8 million active installs means these plugins cover 49% of all WooCommerce stores.

These plugins alone thus account for over $1 billion in failed payments per year, according to our estimates.

This claim is supported by reviews on WordPress.org: the three plugins are among the worst-rated on ​​WordPress.org. An average rating of 2.8 stars puts them in the bottom 0.25% of all plugins (source).

WooCommerce stores need successful payments to grow. PeachPay’s robust Stripe and PayPal integrations, paired with its conversion-optimized checkout experience, offer WooCommerce merchants the quality they deserve.

The studies referenced above cover payments that have failed. An additional category is checkouts that are abandoned because the checkout is too slow. 50% of consumers report abandoning a purchase because the checkout process was too long or complicated.

PeachPay offers consumers an extremely fast checkout experience, significantly reducing abandonment rates.

PeachPay is free, and there’s no increase to the transaction fees paid by stores (PeachPay instead monetizes by taking a portion of the fee from the payment processor). Get PeachPay today: https://peachpay.app/

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