A missing preferred payment method costs shops every fifth basket — US study
An analysis by PYMNTS Intelligence published on 16 September 2026 puts a number on what a gap in the checkout costs: 21 per cent of US consumers have abandoned a basket because their preferred payment method was missing. 47 per cent of them wanted to use a wallet.
What happened
On 16 September 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence published results from the report “The Hidden Cost of Checkout Gaps”. According to it, 21 per cent of the US consumers surveyed abandoned an online basket because their preferred payment method was not offered — extrapolated, around 56 million shoppers. 47 per cent of those abandoners, some 26.3 million people, would have wanted to use a digital wallet. Abandonment is heavily skewed by age: 36 per cent among Generation Z, 31 per cent among millennials, 15 per cent among Generation X, 8 per cent among baby boomers and older. The correlation with financial circumstances is striking: among respondents living paycheck to paycheck, 29 per cent abandoned, compared with 11 per cent among those without financial strain. 87 million US consumers — around a third — paid online with a wallet in the 30 days before the survey. 52 per cent of wallet users consider it likely that they will link their wallet to an AI agent within two years. The survey relates exclusively to the USA; the publication does not state a sample size.
Who it affects
Online merchants and shop operators who have not touched their payment method portfolio for years. Particularly shops with a young target group and small baskets, where the share of wallet payers is highest.
Assessment
The figures are American and cannot be transferred one to one to Germany — the mix here is too different, with invoice purchase and direct debit playing a role that they do not have in the USA. What is transferable, though, is the mechanism, and it is uncomfortable: a missing payment method does not create a cost item, it creates lost revenue. It shows up in no report, because the abandonment happens before the transaction. That is why tenths of a percentage point in fees are negotiated for weeks, while the question of which payment method is missing in the first place never gets asked.
The second figure is the more important one. If every second wallet user can imagine hooking their wallet up to an AI agent within two years, then the wallet is not just a payment method but the interface through which automated purchases will run in future. Anyone without a wallet in the checkout today will tomorrow lose not just the buyer who wanted to use one, but the connection to the channel behind it. That is not an argument for blindly adding every scheme — each additional payment method costs integration, coordination and complaints handling. It is an argument for aligning the selection with data rather than habit, just once.
What to do now
- Analyse in the shop system at which step abandonments happen, and look at the payment method page separately. Only then do you know whether the gap is real.
- Sort the payment methods actually used over the past twelve months by revenue share and complaint rate, and cut the ones that contribute nothing before adding new ones.
- Ask your payment service provider which wallets and European schemes can be switched on without a new integration — as a rule the effort is lower than assumed.