Paze Pulse® Report: Building Trust With Today’s Consumer

Our new voice of the consumer research reveals decisions driving conversion, loyalty, and revenue based on trust.

A customer reaches your checkout page ready to buy. Product selected, intent confirmed. And then something unexpected happens. They hesitate, switch to guest checkout, manually enter their card details...or abandon the purchase entirely.

Many merchants conflate these moments with friction—too many steps, too much time, too much complexity. But our latest research points to a different root cause: trust.

We’re seeing that consumers are not simply completing transactions. They are actively evaluating whether they trust the experience, often in ways that are invisible to merchants.

These trust decisions have direct business implications:

• Conversion rates
• Cart abandonment
• Repeat purchase behavior
• Customer lifetime value

Many of the shopping behaviors merchants try to optimize away, like guest checkout or manual entry, are deliberate risk-management strategies for consumers.
 

Trust is evaluated across four pillars

Our research found that consumers assess trust across four key dimensions:

• Reliability
• Security
• Recourse
• Control

These pillars can shape behavior before, during, and after checkout. A breakdown in any one of them can cause a transaction to fail.
 

The takeaway for merchants

Efforts to optimize checkout often focus on reducing steps, increasing speed, and simplifying design. While these improvements can enhance usability, they may not drive meaningful gains in isolation.

We asked Accelerant Research to conduct research on consumers’ online payment experiences and what drives conversion. The results of that research revealed that conversion is ultimately a function of trust. Consumers complete transactions when they feel confident that the experience will be reliable, secure, and supported if something goes wrong.

Merchants that recognize trust as a system, rather than a single feature, are better positioned to build lasting customer relationships and drive sustained growth.
 

Download the report

This is just a preview. The full Paze Pulse® report explores:

• The motivations and implications of the four trust pillars
• The five key behaviors driving trust decisions
• Actual consumer quotes and research data
• Practical implications of improving conversion