• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, February 4, 2016

Despite spending a lot of bug testing time on their checkout pages, retailers often forget to apply the rigorous testing to their PayPal integrations, and it’s killing conversions.

According to research from MoovWeb, retailers that don’t integrate well with PayPal can expect to see 14% lower conversion rates from users who select the payment service as opposed to those that pay with credit cards. The conclusions are drawn from 2 million page views from over 750,000 smartphone shoppers.

The findings are somewhat counterintuitive says MoovWeb vice president of marketing Haresh Kumar. PayPal auto-populates forms and fields when users want to check out. One could assume that for conversions, the less typing done, the better.

However, PayPal adds another step to the process, asking for login information and creating another opportunity for exit.

MoovWeb helps brands move to mobile and optimize their mobile checkouts. According to Kumar, “[Optimization] is not as easy as just copying code in and running it. The onus is on the payment system to make integration simpler, and on retailers to increase their focus on consumers.”

More and more, consumers are getting comfortable with the idea of mobile payments, especially peer to peer apps like Cash and Venmo, or apps that businesses are latching onto, like Apple Pay and Google Pay. If retailers want to keep the conversion rates on their mobile Web sites high they will need to be thinking about integrating with some of these new services. (The mobile Web is where nearly 80% of conversions on mobile devices happen, says Kumar.)

But they also need to consider how payment services can integrate more fully with their sites.