70% of Consumers Choose Retailers Based on Payment Options, PYMNTS and PayPal Report Says

Only about 20% of businesses appear ready for the next phase of shopping, where AI agents may help consumers find, compare and buy products before they ever visit a merchant’s site. For PSPs and high-risk merchants, the message is blunt: checkout is no longer just the last step before settlement; it is now part of acquisition, conversion, and repeat purchase.

1. PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal published The Next-Gen Commerce Playbook: Turning Checkout Into a Compounding Customer Loop in the Checkout Paradox Tracker Series. The report argues that checkout is becoming the point where merchants capture intent, complete the purchase, and set up the next transaction, especially as commerce gets more automated and consumers expect faster, more personal, and more secure buying experiences.
2. The report says 70% of consumers choose where they shop based on whether their preferred payment methods are available. In practice, that puts payment choice in the same category as pricing and product availability: if the methods are not there, the sale can die before it starts. For high-risk merchants, this is the familiar acquiring problem with a new label.
3. Merchant appetite for checkout upgrades is strong: 94% of merchants are very or extremely interested in at least one innovation tied to smoother checkout and payments. The report also says 62% show high interest in biometric authentication, while 51% of consumers recently used biometric methods. That is the kind of gap PSPs watch closely, because merchant enthusiasm does not automatically mean consumer adoption, but it usually does mean budget.
4. Fast checkout remains a conversion lever. 84% of shoppers say one-click checkout is an important factor when choosing where to shop, 80% use stored credentials, and 67% of users rely on vaults for faster processing. That is a fairly direct business case for tokenization, stored payment credentials, and lower-friction repeat billing.
5. The report frames the next phase of commerce as agentic commerce, where AI agents may help consumers search, compare, and buy before they reach a merchant site. In that setup, checkout becomes the connective layer across discovery, payment choice, security, stored credentials, rewards, and follow-up engagement. The practical takeaway for merchants is straightforward: make payment selection easier, surface relevant methods and offers, and keep authentication fast with passkeys, app-based verification, and biometrics.

The larger point is not that merchants need to predict every AI-led shopping workflow. They need to make checkout useful enough to convert now and flexible enough to be the default path when consumers are handed more of the buying process by software.