The checkout experience is a retailer’s digital moment of truth, where a carefully built customer journey succeeds or fails. As emerging search technologies reshape how customers discover products online, retailers face intensifying competition for website traffic, making the ability to convert visitors once they arrive more crucial than ever.
Nearly half of shoppers (49%) abandon purchases after just three minutes of friction, but today’s competitive digital commerce is about more than just speed—it requires understanding each customer as an individual with unique preferences, while ensuring security.
This is where AI transforms the retail landscape. There are three key ways retailers can embrace AI today to create a better customer experience: providing personalised payment methods, agentic commerce and fraud prevention. The result isn’t just increased conversion, it’s a fundamentally more human digital shopping experience.
The personalisation payoff
Every customer’s experience is unique. Their location, the product they’re purchasing and their preferred payment method all influence how they want to complete a transaction. For the past decade, we’ve been using AI in our checkout technology for fraud prevention and personalisation, but many retailers still rely on static, one-size-fits-all checkout flows. AI offers a way forward, processing data in real-time to tailor every checkout experience to each unique scenario.
Offering the right payment methods is key to this personalisation. While having a variety of payment methods to suit individual preferences is best practice, too many options can take away from the personalised customer experience.
AI enables retailers to personalise payment methods based on what’s likely to resonate with each customer. For example, while some customers might prefer Afterpay or Zip for large purchases, when it comes to purchasing products such as flights or hotels, they might be most likely to convert by using a card with frequent flyer benefits. This personalised approach directly translates into measurable business results: when at least one additional relevant payment method beyond cards is surfaced, businesses on average see a 12% increase in revenue and a 7% increase in conversion rates.
The New Personal Shopper
Agentic commerce takes personalisation further by enabling AI agents to find products and complete purchases on consumers’ behalf. These agents understand customer preferences and can execute transactions when they find optimal matches, creating new sales channels while eliminating friction.
For consumers, the benefits are significant – time savings from offloading tedious comparison shopping, better purchase decisions based on comprehensive market analysis and less impulse buying through objective decision-making. AI agents are especially helpful for repeat purchases, subscription management and buying decisions needing to compare lots of different product features.
For retailers, agentic commerce opens new doors beyond their own websites, creating connections with customers through LLM-powered apps and affiliate sites. Take End of Financial Year sales currently underway. Instead of shoppers clicking through multiple deal sites and filling out forms repeatedly, AI agents can complete purchases directly from third-party sites—creating new sales channels for merchants while eliminating friction for consumers.
Frictionless fraud prevention
A critical challenge retailers face when offering efficiency and personalisation is ensuring they’re secure from scammers. Balancing fraud prevention with user experience is a high-stakes game and AI can help by adjusting security checks on the fly based on transaction risk. This ensures high-risk transactions are screened thoroughly while low-risk shoppers enjoy a smoother experience.
Bikes Online, which sells factory-direct bikes at 30-40% discounts, saved $10,000 monthly in both Australia and New Zealand using Stripe Radar while accepting $40,000 more in transactions. Radar’s effectiveness stems from Stripe’s vast network—93% of cards processed have been seen previously, providing crucial context about legitimate usage patterns across millions of businesses.
Staying ahead in the checkout race
Today’s retail leaders are deploying AI that recognises each customer as an individual, dynamically adjusts security based on real-time risk assessment and presents only the most relevant payment options—all in milliseconds. The results are double-digit conversion increases, significant fraud reduction and the ability to meet customers wherever they shop—whether on your site or through AI shopping agents elsewhere.
The AI-powered checkout isn’t just a better version of what came before—it’s an entirely new approach that recognises what truly matters isn’t the mechanics of payment but the human on the other side. In a digital world increasingly defined by automation, the most successful retailers will be those who use technology not to create distance from their customers, but to understand them more deeply than ever before.