Online retailers that don't support digital wallets are losing Gen Z customers
A new study reveals that Gen Z shoppers are significantly more likely to abandon online carts if their preferred digital wallet is not supported. This behavior results in substantial profit losses for retailers, as nearly half of this demographic will switch merchants or skip purchases when payment options are limited. The trend is driven by the rising popularity of digital wallets and Buy Now, Pay Later services among younger consumers facing financial pressures.
- ▪36 percent of Gen Z shoppers abandoned a cart in the last 30 days due to missing preferred payment options, a rate 1.7 times the overall average.
- ▪Digital wallets were used in 40 percent of online purchases in 2025, with Gen Z showing the highest adoption rate at 47 percent.
- ▪17.7 million customers abandoned purchases specifically because PayPal was unavailable, with 11.1 million citing the lack of PayPal Pay Later as the reason.
- ▪Gen Z spending power is projected to reach $12 trillion by 2030, making their payment preferences a critical factor for retail strategy.
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| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2273492/online-retailers-dont-support-digital-wallets-losing-gen-z-customers/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-03T22:04:28.118Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-03T22:04:28.118Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | m22J9nV8WJ7f · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Big Tech Online retailers that don't support digital wallets are losing Gen Z customers A study suggests younger people are more likely to walk away if their preferred payment option isn't supported. By Kari Paul Oct. 3, 2026 6:00 pm EST khunkornStudio/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Gen Z, the generation widely considered to be digital natives, is particularly choosy when it comes to online purchasing, a new study has found. Online shoppers frequently browse sites, fill their carts and head to checkout — only to abandon the purchase if their preferred digital wallet is not available for check out, according to a recent study from global data and analytics platform PYMNTS Intelligence.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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