3-D secure hits website checkout conversion rates

We have all been there... you reach the checkout of a website to make an online purchase, your carefully enter your credit card details, and then you get taken off to your card issuer's 3-d secure page (e.g. verified by Visa) and are prompted for another password which you can't remember. If we really want to make a purchase we then go through the phaff of entering a few personal details and setting a new password to be forgotten next time we go shopping. Is this really helping card fraud? I doubt it! However, this extra step in the checkout causes a massive problem for retailers.

One of the golden rules of Ecommerce website design is avoiding barriers to purchase. The less things the shopper has to do, and the less distractions the better. Give them every opportunity to complete their purchase. Each change to an Ecommerce website must be analysed to see if it distracts or increases the complexity for checking out. Are their too many required fields on the customer registration page? Are there too many adverts or links on the checkout to distract the user. Ecommerce website conversion rates are dreadful at the best of times, so the online retailer must do everything in their power to reduce the barriers to purchase.

3-d secure systems fly in the face of this. The shopper whisked off to some odd looking page and asked for a credit card password. More often than not, they can't remember this password. 3-D secure becomes a gigantic barrier to purchase and causes large abandonment rates.

Although more and more online shoppers are getting used to the 3-D secure process, the issue of the forgotten purchase is not going to go away. I'd love to see statistics of how often the average shopper resets their online 3-D secure password - I expect it is very high.

Unfortunately, as a retailer there isn't much you can do. Banks force you to use this technology, and make you pay huge merchant fees if you try and avoid it. One possibility is chasing up abandoned baskets. By the time somebody has got to the payment stage, you've already collected their personal details - so it won't be difficult to email these people asking them why they didn't complete their purchase. Even offer to have your mail order department call them up to take the card details over the phone and complete the purchase!

This problem will stay with us until the bank's invent a new range of technologies to combat fraud. One interesting development are the credit cards with built in keypads. Many users of online business banking will be familiar with this technology - you type a code into the keypad and it issues a new code for you to enter in the website.