Today In Data: Omnireadi Merchants, Payments Evolve And Supply And Demand Drives Price

The end of the year can make people do things they wouldn’t normally do, like spend three or four times the list price on a low-supply pair of shoes. It can also be a perfect time for merchants to reevaluate how they are selling to consumers, and many have made great strides toward easing cross-border selling and boosting global inclusiveness. That means consumers are more able than ever to buy what they want from sellers across continents — even those that are ridiculously marked up.

Today in PYMNTS’ data, limited edition items drive prices up this holiday shopping season, merchants are accepting multiple payment types to win over customers, price is keeping financial services firms from implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning, sellers are improving global inclusiveness efforts and cash still makes up a surprising number of U.K. payments each year.

Here are the numbers:

$1,500 | Increased price of limited edition Kanye West Yeezy sneakers by Adidas. The original price for the high-demand item was $200 to $300 per pair.

94.5 percent | Percentage of surveyed merchants in the X-Border Payments Optimization Index (a Braintree collaboration) that accept Visa as a payment type, followed by Mastercard at 94 percent and PayPal at 79.8 percent of merchants.

75 percent | Portion of financial services firms that have not yet implemented artificial intelligence and machine learning, likely due to cost.

58.1 | Merchants’ average X-Border Payments Optimization Index score, on a scale of zero to 100, indicating they are slowly improving their global inclusiveness.

40 percent | Portion of all payments for which cash accounted in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Bank of England. Cash also made up 44 percent of payments by consumers that year.