5 secrets that power business success through payments

5 secrets that power business success through paymentsFrom donuts to haircuts through groceries to mass market goods, running a successful enterprise retail business requires more than just selling things consumers want. There are a ton of factors that contribute to the seamless buying experience consumers expect. Many of the same factors drive the streamlined operations businesses count on for efficiency and financial management.

What’s the axis on which this is centered today? The payment experience. Simply put, the forms and ways you accept payments ties it all together.

We’re living in a complex world of commerce without borders, where technology intersects with customer relationships. Connecting with your customers wherever they are—online, in-store, on their mobile devices, and even in other countries—calls for thoughtful navigation of the many payment options, devices and experiences that define current day commerce.

In navigating the right payments path to the future, enterprise retail businesses like yours face many questions including:

The answers to these questions are important when considering how you want to accept payments, as well as determining the devices and experiences that create acceptance opportunities. Investing the time and effort to determine solutions that are right for you will help you meet and exceed customer expectations. Let’s take a look at how you can use payment solutions to make your business more successful than ever.

How do you accept and reconcile payments

across all sales channels?

How can you leverage data from payment

transactions to benefit your bottom line?

How can payments make business operations

easier, drive customer loyalty, and grow revenue?

Connect with your customers, wherever they areKnowing your customers has always been important for the success of any business, but it’s not so easy to pin down modern day consumers. They’re buying online and picking up in-store, comparing prices on their smartphone while browsing merchandise on location, purchasing from one store location and returning at another, and in general, blending sales channels as they shop and buy.

“Omniconsumers,” the name given by some to these modern consumers, expect a seamless, flawless experience wherever they spend time and money. Online, in-store, or via mobile device, a payment is at the heart of all those experiences.

Omniconsumers aren’t a new breed of consumer. More and more, they’re today’s mainstream consumers. They dominate the current shopping and buying landscape, and you’ll need to acknowledge the way commerce has changed in order to stay relevant and competitive.

Adopting an omnichannel payment strategy is key to reaching consumers who are short on time, long on options, and expect to pay on demand. By investing in payment tools that use digital means to encourage in-store visits and vice versa, you can capture customer interest in all possible channels.

Additionally, your payment solution must address technology, security, and customer experience expectations—whether your customers are in the U.S. or around the world. You should ask yourself these questions:

Those questions highlight the types of challenges that can be difficult to handle alone, but are much easier with the support of an experienced and reputable payment provider. With the right partner to help you sort through the possibilities and choose the right solutions for your business, you can accept payments easily, quickly, and securely—regardless of where your customers are shopping.

Does your payment solution come with

powerful security features to ensure and protect

cardholder identity across both card-present

and card-not-present transactions?

Does it accommodate online payment

transactions from customers in other

countries?

Does it provide you with convenient customer service options as you

serve both in-store and online shoppers?

1

Drive frictionless commerce with loyalty and rewardsIt takes less time, effort, and money to retain a current customer than to recruit a new one, but there’s a way to do both. Today’s enterprise businesses are engaging payment solutions to help retain customers and acquire new ones, build brand recognition, and drive additional revenue. Loyalty rewards programs that integrate with payments are a popular way to engage customers and encourage more frequent visits across instore and online sales channels.

Just as paper gift certificates have given way to plastic gift cards, digital eGift cards are quickly becoming a consumer favorite. Today’s omniconsumers love to receive and redeem gift cards online as much as they do instore, and they are sharing the love on social media as well. In a fast, competitive digital world, a gift card service that operates seamlessly across all sales channels and locations and integrates easily with your payments infrastructure offers the best return on investment.

Today’s comprehensive gift card services enhance traditional offerings with features like physical-to-digital gift card conversion and rewards that incentivize customers to shop and spend more. Turnkey digital promotion programs encourage viral sharing and help support an enterprise’s omnicommerce strategy. And automated gift card transaction reporting and reconciliation tie it all together, making it easier to manage gift card sales and redemptions across many locations.

Automatic discounts are a top reason why consumers join loyalty rewards programs, but today’s offerings go beyond automatic coupons to personalized customer engagements.

2With the ability to track and analyze loyal customers’ spending, enterprise retailers can craft customized offers and promotions that deepen relationships even further. Examples include free items for customer birthdays or enrollment anniversary dates, or access to invitation-only preview sales and other special shopping events.

A robust gift card service that bridges online and in-store visits at all locations and offers actionable insights into customer shopping behavior can help enterprise retailers better understand their customers and build valuable relationships with them.

“Gift cards really took our Fuzzibucks to a new professional level within the adult community. We’re seeing professional organizations like banks using our gift cards as employee rewards and incentives.” ~ Fuzziwig’s Candy

Embrace alternative payment typesThe emergence of non-card focused approaches to payments is enhancing the checkout experience. And today’s enterprise businesses have the unique advantage of being able to capitalize on these and other developing trends in payments that not only speed checkout, but also reduce the cost of acceptance.

One example is decoupled debit (via ACH), which eliminates the handling of a payment as a card transaction. This payment types allows customers to link their checking account information directly to a retailer’s loyalty rewards program. It basically functions like an electronic check that is accessed via a customer’s loyalty account.

Decoupled debit offers benefits for both consumers and merchants: the customer can pay using their loyalty program information or PIN, and the merchant can realize significant cost savings. With interchange typically comprising 80 percent of the cost to process a traditional credit or debit card transaction, decoupled debit can result in meaningful reduction in processing fees.

While consumers are interested in this payment type, it’s important to note that they are looking for incentives to sign up. A primary motivator for enrolling is consumer desire to receive automatic discounts at the time of purchase. Consumers also look for free items, BOGO, rebates, and store credits.

Another example of an alternative payments type is in-app payments via mobile shopping apps. While in-app payments don’t offer the same cost-savings as decoupled debit, this payment type is nevertheless leading the way in seamless and customized ecommerce. And consumers are increasingly jumping on board.

3 Like decoupled debit, loyalty rewards play a key role in the use of in-app purchases; consumers commonly use the apps to retrieve coupons or deals. Using geolocation tools, businesses can easily push out special offers to customers that are in the vicinity and attract last-minute customers who may have otherwise walked on by.

Offering your customers many options to pay securely and seamlessly should be a major priority for building long-lasting and lucrative relationships. Decoupled debit and in-app payments are just two of the non-card based payment options enterprise businesses can utilize to help reduce costs, expand customer loyalty, and enhance the checkout experience.

Decoupled debit and in-app payments are two payment options that help reduce costs, expand customer loyalty, and enhance the checkout experience

Enable international eCommerceIs your business accidentally international? If your retail enterprise has an online presence, there’s a good chance that you’ve gone global, even if your physical stores haven’t. Over the last 20 years, the walls of commerce have disappeared because of the internet, allowing consumers to shop the world without booking a flight. And shopping they are—U.S. eCommerce sales are expected to grow from $295 billion in 2015 to $485 billion in 2021 (Statista).

Whether or not your enterprise is actively engaging in international eCommerce or plans to do so in the future, it’s definitely an area worth paying attention to. The opportunity to convert an international consumer into an international customer is lucrative and ripe for the picking.

Accelerating international eCommerce requires certain payments considerations and capabilities depending on how an enterprise wants to go about it. Some questions to consider include:

This is where customer payment data can be very useful. Insights into your payments transactions can help identify where your customers are coming from around the world,

4and the strategies and currency solutions that can help you intentionally attract and convert them.

In 2016, an estimated 1.61 billion people across the world purchased online, and that number is expected to continue to rise. Selling internationally can best be achieved with payment tools designed to help lower shopping cart abandonment rates, increase card processing approval rates, and maximize checkout conversions by addressing preferred payment methods across the globe.

Accelerating borderless commerce requires certain payments considerations and capabilities depending on how an enterprise wants to go about it

Do you want to sell in other currencies but settle in U.S. dollars?

Or sell and settle exclusively in other

currencies?

Are you reaching the markets where you have customers you may not even know

you have?

Do you have the right tools in place

to mitigate the high cart abandonment

rates that can occur with international

eCommerce?

Get the big picturePeople have been talking about “big data” for some time, but most are doing nothing meaningful with it. Why? It’s one thing to collect the data, another thing to analyze it, and something else altogether to connect all the dots and figure out what to do next. And the reality is that it’s easy to miss critical customer information because a lot of what’s going on is happening outside of your enterprise.

The overarching questions to ask are:

Payments are a good starting point to get to the answers, since connecting customer transactions across an enterprise provides information about how efficiently and profitably a business is running. While marketing, operations, and finance departments all have an interest in payments data, they each use the data differently. Your marketing team wants to understand customer behavior and purchasing patterns; your operations team wants to eliminate any inefficiencies; and your finance team wants to ensure your bottom line is healthy.

But you also need to know the types of transactions your customers are making outside of your enterprise. This bigger picture view of competitors and consumer activity is a key advantage to understanding consumer spending, optimizing processing operations and costs, reducing fraud exposure, maximizing authorizations, and improving customer relationship management.

How do you know if you are getting the most out of

the data you collect?

Are you receiving the signals that your customers are sending you with the types of transactions

they are making?

5 A large pool of data is necessary in order for enterprises to get the information they need to know about their customers. Demographic, financial and lifestyle data help paint a picture of your customers that you can use to drive conversion and loyalty. This data reveals trends that you can use to influence future sales activity. For example, if you can see when instore and online shopping rises and falls, you could schedule related promotions to coincide with these customer behaviors.

Data truly is the final piece of the business puzzle, pointing you to where your business is doing well and where adjustments need to be made. It’s critical for determining tangible actions to take, so make sure you’re approaching it with the attention it deserves.

Succeeding with modern commerce

Omnicommerce. Customer loyalty. Frictionless payments. International eCommerce. Big data. These are the big ideas you should be thinking about to ensure the future success of your enterprise business. And payments are the common thread running through it all. Whether your enterprise is national or regional, corporate or franchised, the time is now to tailor your payment processing solutions to meet the demands of modern day commerce.

To learn more, visit worldpay.com