Regulatory Shifts and Cyberattacks Put UK Merchant Credential Storage in the Spotlight

In the current environment, no matter what the country, consumers are keenly aware of the pressures of inflation, of how far their spending can stretch, and where they may have to pull back. For a merchant to have a fighting chance, to convert browsing into buying, the commerce experience itself must be as seamless as possible.

A moment of friction — where, say, a consumer must input their personal and payments-related data by hand, at the point of checkout — well, that’s a moment in which a sale can be lost.  That’s especially true when so much of shopping is done online, or in a digital-first manner in the case where a consumer might wield their device in a brick-and-mortar setting as part of the commerce journey.

In the “Global Digital Shopping Index, U.K. Edition,” done in collaboration between Visa Acceptance Solutions and PYMNTS Intelligence, we found that mobile devices are a key conduit to commerce in the United Kingdom. We surveyed 2,826 consumers and 519 merchants in the country into the end of last year.

Unified Shopping

Cross-channel shopping has taken root in most countries, but in the U.K., only about 12% of shoppers use those features. Cross-channel shopping refers to the ability to start shopping in one channel and finish in another in a connected manner. In one scenario, a customer leverages a mobile app to look into a product’s availability, reserves it online and travel to the store to pick it up.

Unified shopping goes further. It provides consumers with seamless access to the same digital features — such as rewards, order history and stored payment methods — no matter where the consumer might be interacting with a merchant, online or in store.

Our data showed that an additional 25% of consumers would use the cross-channel options if they were offered. Given the fact that 49% of U.K.-based consumers used mobile devices to make their most recent purchases, and 50% of those shoppers used stored credentials as part of those transactions, at least those done online, there’s significant opportunity for merchants to leverage both attributes of a streamlined commerce journey. The use of stored credentials improves the checkout experience and keeps customers coming back for friction-free shopping. Third-party checkouts and digital wallets were also widely used, at 16%.

As for the merchants, the data show that only 34% of shoppers in the country store payment credentials with online merchants most or all the time — the second-lowest rate among the eight countries we surveyed, so merchants should do more to encourage the practice of storing credentials. Merchants can do this by pointing to the advantages that accrue upon using stored credentials. For U.K. shoppers, speed tops the list, named by 62% as a factor among those whose willingness to store payment information with merchants increased over the last 12 months. Ease and convenience follows closely, at 57%, with trust coming in at 36%.

The stored credentials, in the meantime, can be part of the “binding” across various forms of commerce, as merchants boost their sales conversions through a better unified shopping experience that brings together key digital shopping features in a centralized app that allows consumers to act on impulse buys without the headwinds of manually inputting data.