Four years.
1,460 days.
For payments — and for commerce in general — 2020 to 2024 brought a whirlwind of change, a re-imagining of the day-to-day interactions between merchants and consumers.
Through the past four years, the joint research between Visa Acceptance and PYMNTS Intelligence — contained in the annual Global Digital Shopping Index — has spotlighted the collective, cumulative insight of what more than 48,000 shoppers want from their businesses of choice across eight countries as far flung as the United States, Brazil and India.
The index also offers up a scorecard, of sorts — and a roadmap — on how those merchants have delivered, where they come up short, and what they need to do.
Rob Cameron, global head of acceptance solutions at Visa, told Karen Webster that the trends are clear: Click-and-mortar shopping is blurring the lines between physical and digital channels.
Although more consumers are shopping in stores, the ways in which they are engaging with merchants — and what’s important to them — are markedly different than four years ago. During the explosion of eCommerce during COVID, many merchants built capacity and invested in their digital channels, and now the investment has shifted back to in-store operations, he said.
Fine-tuning the multi-channel approach — but tying those channels together — has become critical, according to Cameron.
“All consumers are just two clicks away from a competitor now, and so the stakes are higher” in the jockeying for share of wallet and fealty to merchants, he told Webster.
No matter where they shop, individuals want the same digital ease, convenience and security as they browse and buy. Payments choice and alternative payment methods are key determinants of satisfaction and loyalty.
In offering the right mix of features at the right time to the right consumers, they can increase their sales as the physical realm is, ideally, simply an extension of digital interaction. The data shows that the satisfaction rate for merchants who enable a digitally savvy shopping experience in-store is more than 50% higher than for those merchants who haven’t yet been able to deliver on that ambition.
To be sure, there’s been some evolution over the past four years.
We’re a long way from the dark days of the pandemic, where click-and-mortar commerce meant a friction-filled experience of “click and collect.” The tortured process entailed buying online, and then waiting in line for what seemed like an eternity to queue up at customer service and retrieve the item that had been bought several days before.
Now we’ve evolved to a model where, as Cameron observed, forward-thinking merchants have found value in incentivizing consumers to venture on-premise. These businesses save on shipping, but they also have a convenient platform across which to stage and upsell items on the spot as consumers grab the order that’s already been completed.
There’s significant room for improvement, said Cameron, who added that “you’d be surprised at how many merchants are running separate online and in-store” operations and “are not thinking about cross-channel tokenization … To see what consumers are doing, in a secure way, across those channels. If they do that, they unlock the ability to treat me better as a consumer and take friction out of the system.”
Mobile apps and geofencing, along with tokenized credentials, can make it possible for merchants to prod consumers with personalized offers and rewards as they walk through the proverbial doors, he said.
The most immediate low-hanging fruit revolves around payments themselves. Three out of four customers told PYMNTS Intelligence/Visa that if a merchant does not offer their favorite way to pay, they walk away, literally, and opt instead to transact with a competitor. Payments choice represents the final step in the process that might be the critical way to make the sale, Cameron said.
For the consumer who’s about to make a purchase, mulling the choices beyond credit and debit — where they can use a buy now, pay later option to pay in four installments — might spur them to boost the basket size.
“You get a more satisfied customer at the end of all this,” said Cameron.
Beyond the payments functionality, Cameron noted that there’s active engagement on the part of consumers with the merchants’ digital offerings. The data shows that consumers use about 87% of the digital features that merchants present to them. But there’s a gap here as consumers say these same retailers do not offer 25% to as much as 50% of the features that they value the most.
That gap demands that merchants examine and understand their consumers better, said Cameron, who added that they need not go it alone in the pursuit of bringing new, streamlined and embedded products and services to shoppers.
Partnering with platforms and providers such as Visa gives these merchants yearning to be digital-first a “superset” of features that can be turned on and off depending on the use case, market or even channel of engagement, he said. In simplifying the offerings themselves, the merchants make it easier for consumers to find and use them — which in turn boosts satisfaction.
“Simplicity always wins,” said Cameron, who added that the “savvy merchants are figuring out — if they haven’t already — how to connect these channels and create a better customer experience than they had three or four years ago.”
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