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Everyone knows introducing friction into the buyer journey contributes to a decrease in conversion rate. This is especially true if you’re expanding your business internationally in high-growth mobile-first markets like Latin American (LATAM), Southeast Asia (SEA), and India (more on that below).
In this article, I’ll show you how you can optimize your buyer journey to drive up conversion rates, and how FastSpring is suited to be your partner in improving conversion rates across the globe.
Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.
How User Behavior in Emerging Markets Is Different From The Rest of World
Markets like India, SEA, and LATAM are unique in how they engage with digital goods and content online. These are markets where a majority of users exist in a world where they had very limited access to desktop computers but now have access to mobile devices.
For example, a recent study by Apptile showed that India and Brazil each saw a 30% increase in mobile commerce sales in 2024. This means that in “mobile-first” markets such as those, a mobile-optimized checkout isn’t optional — it’s mandatory, even if you’re offering a product that’s primarily purchased on desktop in other regions of the world.
Using checkout options that offer integrated mobile-friendly payment methods such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, UPI, Pix, and others is an easy step in the right direction towards optimizing for mobile-first transactions.
Businesses entering these markets must take into account the different payment preferences as compared to more established markets.
For example, credit cards remain dominant in North America and much of Europe, but they are far less common in countries like India and Brazil, where most users rely on bank transfers, mobile wallets, and domestic card schemes.
Taking it a step deeper, in India, fewer than 5% of consumers even own a credit card — less are internationally capable cards — while UPI now accounts for more than 75% of all digital retail transactions. Plus, UPI’s integration with mobile wallets like Google Pay and PhonePe means that most users can complete transactions without the need to ever enter any card details.
In Brazil, Pix has quickly become the most-used payment method, as reported by the Banco Central do Brazil, with more than 150 million users relying on its instant, fee-free bank transfers, and 24/7 availability. Local card schemes like Elo and Hipercard are also prevalent, especially among buyers without international credit access.
Companies that fail to support local payment methods such as these are risking high cart abandonment in these emerging markets, particularly when users are forced into unfamiliar payment flows.
The most successful companies in emerging regions (and elsewhere across the globe) don’t just offer more payment methods: They offer the right ones.
A merchant of record like FastSpring helps businesses integrate the most preferred options in each market — like UPI, Pix, Hipercard, and more — while automatically displaying local currencies and brand-consistent checkout designs.
Emerging market buyers are highly sensitive to trust signals, local relevance, and pricing transparency. When the checkout experience meets these expectations, payment success rates go up, drop-off goes down, and new revenue becomes unlocked from previously hard-to-reach markets.
Why Branding Matters
It’s not uncommon to find a new product or subscription you’re interested in purchasing, but when you begin the checkout process, a change in style, branding, or experience gives you pause — and ultimately, you decide not to make the purchase.
Companies looking to increase their conversion rates should look for ways to maintain a consistent brand look and feel throughout the entire purchase journey.
A study by Baymard showed that 19% of shoppers in the US abandoned their purchase because they “didn’t trust the site with [their] credit card information.”Another example from WPFastestCache showed that an online retailer was able to increase their conversions by 220% by focusing on trust in their checkout experience.
Offering validation to your customers through testimonials, security badges, consistent branding, consistent URLs, and more have an effect that is much greater than the sum of the effort to add them.
The same is true in gaming. Players who visit your web shop but are presented with a site that doesn’t look like the game they came from — or who have a checkout experience that doesn’t match the branding of the publisher — are more likely to drop off than players who are given a familiar experience to the shop and game they’re playing.
Further customization in experiences during checkout have been shown to make 80% of consumers more likely to buy, according to a study from Epsilon research.
What does this mean? Use the information you already know about your buyers to make the experience more tailored to them.
If you have buyers sign up for an account, pre-populate their name and email into the checkout page. If they’ve made a purchase from you before, offer them single-click payment options. These small details go a long way to not only building buyer confidence, but also to reducing purchase friction along the way.
Consistency in branding can be as advanced as adding a discrete embedded checkout to your website or as simple as applying a “dark mode” theme.
Considerations that your business should be making are things like:
- Where are my buyers coming from?
- What devices are they using to make their purchase?
For example, decisions like these become important to users in a mobile-first economy because they may be making a purchase late at night, so offering a dark mode checkout prevents blinding screen glare that comes from a bright checkout. Or, offering a clean, embedded checkout experience on your site that is primarily reached by desktop buyers can maintain a frictionless experience that will lead to the uptick in conversions you’re looking for.
Even small checkout branding considerations like the above make a difference for your buyers and your business. At FastSpring, we offer checkout themes to help you match your site’s branding, offer different themes of checkout, and more to ensure that whether your buyer is browsing from bed, or you’re offering a premium embedded experience on desktop, we have the flexibility to match your business’ needs.
Ready to upgrade your online checkout with an all-in-one payments platform that includes branded checkout, localized payments, and even VAT and sales tax management? Schedule your personalized demo now.
How Fewer Steps and Simplicity Drive Up Conversions
Each step or form field in a checkout is another opportunity for your buyers to drop off. Research consistently shows that simplifying the checkout flow — reducing the number of pages, clicks and required inputs — can drive significant conversion gains.
According to Baymard Institute, nearly one in five online shoppers have abandoned an order specifically because checkout was too complicated or took too long. Their research also shows that businesses can achieve up to a 35% conversion lift simply by streamlining checkout UX.
One way that companies have seen success in driving increased conversions is by taking multi-step checkout processes and reducing them into a single, straightforward page. This can mean offering the ability to purchase without creating an account, or reducing the number of fields required for checkout completion.
At FastSpring, we offer flexibility through our platform to meet your requirements for data entry on checkout for your buyers. These are features like the ability to deselect unnecessary fields like addresses, zip code, or others.
Plus, we’ve streamlined our embedded checkout to simplify data entry and remove unnecessary checkout steps, including combining the month and year into a single field and adding credit card icons into the credit card entry field for easier visualization.
Beyond reducing steps, improved clarity and user guidance play critical roles in driving conversions. Small changes such as clearly labeled buttons, auto-complete fields (which can be done via FastSpring’s Store Builder Library), or other simplified forms can lead to dramatic results.
Each incremental improvement in clarity and simplicity helps buyers feel more confident, reducing hesitation and significantly increasing the likelihood of completed purchases.
How Do You Know When Conversion Rates Need Improvement?
When evaluating conversion rates, aim to be within the 2-4% range, according to industry experts like Shopify. These rates can fluctuate depending on your industry and the goods you’re selling, but it’s always important to watch for signals and changes in your conversion rates. Signals like a sudden spike in cart abandonment, consistent declines in specific markets or regions, or lower-than-average conversions on mobile devices are all metrics you can use to monitor performance in emerging markets as you grow your business in those regions.
To support your growth, FastSpring offers its Checkout Conversion Dashboard to monitor checkout problems at three critical milestones: Sessions, Orders, and Completed Orders.
For example, an unusual dip in “Orders” relative to “Sessions” might suggest that buyers are not entering their payment details, possibly due to confusing UI elements or a misalignment in branding from your site to your checkout.
Our dashboard goes a step deeper by enabling targeted analysis through its built-in filters. You can drill down by timeframe, product line, country, or customer segment to isolate specific issues. For instance, you might notice a high rate of abandoned checkouts in a certain region, indicating that you need to enable a local payment method there.
Switch to FastSpring to Improve Your Purchase Flow
No matter if you’re selling in-game content via your web store, offering presets for your photography editing collection, selling audio production software, or anything in between, the reality remains that reducing friction and uncertainty at checkout boosts conversions across the globe, and more so in emerging markets.
And whether that’s by streamlining the UX, offering the right payment options (and currency) for each customer, or reinforcing brand trust and consistency, each improvement has measurable results. These changes mean that even though you might have run into conversion rate challenges, a large portion of those churned purchases are preventable. By addressing known buyer pain points, you can hold on to a big slice of revenue from your buyers.
Continuously refining your purchase flow by making it fast, easy, and tailored to your user needs across all markets will increase the percentage of your website visitors that turn into paying customers, without the need to spend more on user acquisition.
FastSpring is here to help. With our suite of tools including Embedded Checkout, Automatic Payment Method and Currency Localization, Advanced JavaScript Library, Conversion Rate Monitoring, and much more, we’re built to help you be successful in your business’ growth endeavors.
Ready to learn more? Set up some time to speak with our experts today.
