What you don’t measure, you don’t manage – The Power of Payment Data in Omnichannel Retail

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Many retailers fail to grasp the critical importance of data, yet it is nearly impossible to run a successful retail operation without it, especially payment data.

Instead, retailers often focus on immediate sales figures, marketing campaigns, inventory management and customer satisfaction surveys. While these elements are important, they only provide a partial view of the business’s health and potential growth areas.

Payment data is an invaluable resource for driving business growth in omnichannel retail, where customers move seamlessly between physical stores, digital channels, and other touchpoints. It is the lifeblood of customer experiences, shaping everything from the initial interaction to the final click of a purchase, and beyond. 

So, how does payment data impact these crucial aspects of omnichannel retail?

Payment Data

Facilitating Seamless Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is the initial interaction that sets the tone for the customer’s entire experience with the brand. According to a Baymard Institute study, 22% of US online shoppers abandon their carts due to a lengthy or complicated checkout process. This is where payment data steps in. It can be used to simplify the process, automatically filling in forms based on past transactions and expediting account creation. This seamless onboarding sets the stage for a positive customer journey right from the start. One-click purchases, pre-populated billing information based on past transactions, and alternative payment options all contribute to a smoother checkout experience, reducing cart abandonment and boosting conversions.

Regulatory Compliance

Payment data not only facilitates an excellent customer experience but also ensures compliance. It plays a vital role in helping retail businesses ensure adherence to Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. By analysing this data, retailers can verify customer identities, screen for suspicious activity, and mitigate fraud risk. This not only protects the business but also fosters trust with customers who value secure transactions. 

Regulatory compliance is another area where management of payment data plays a critical role. Strong data management and governance acts as the backbone for adhering to various regulations, such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Non-compliance with regulations can result in hefty fines and reputational damage.

Customer Insights

The benefits of payment data extend beyond simply checking compliance boxes. Data analytics enables retailers to gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, market trends, and overall business performance. This helps them to make data-driven decisions and optimise their omnichannel strategies, ensuring long-term success. A McKinsey & Company article emphasises that companies that leverage customer behavioural insights outperform their peers by up to 85% in sales growth and over 25% in gross margin.

Hyper-personalisation

Payment data helps retailers achieve a 360-degree view of their customers and cultivate stronger customer relationships. However, for payment data to be a truly useful tool, it needs to be organised and processed correctly using good data models or normalisation techniques. This ensures the data is accurate, consistent, and usable for generating valuable insights. By integrating payment data into their CRM systems, retailers can personalise marketing campaigns by analysing purchase history, preferred payment methods, and loyalty program participation. They can recommend relevant products based on past behaviour and tailor the overall customer experience. This data-driven approach fosters loyalty and encourages repeat business. A McKinsey & Company study reveals that faster-growing companies derive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. 

Secure Transactions and Fraud Detection

Seamless and secure transactions are essential to a successful omnichannel experience. Payment data ensures a smooth checkout process for both international and domestic transactions, regardless of the location, payment method, or channel. Advanced analytics of this data allows retailers to quickly detect fraudulent transactions in real-time, safeguarding their business and customers. This focus on security builds trust and encourages repeat business. According to a Juniper Research study, online payment fraud losses are expected to exceed $362 billion globally between 2023 and 2028, highlighting the importance of robust fraud detection measures.

Secure data handling practices, such as encryption and tokenisation, widely adopted across industries, protect sensitive payment information from being intercepted or misused. Because of the increasing sophistication of fraud, payment data becomes even more crucial in instances where a retailer has been defrauded. The data facilitates proactive chargeback management by identifying suspicious transactions and implementing robust fraud detection mechanisms. This enables retailers to minimise chargebacks and protect their bottom line.

Better Rates Negotiation

Retailers can negotiate better rates with payment processors by leveraging detailed analysis of their transaction data. By examining transaction volumes, distinguishing between cross-border and domestic transactions, and understanding the distribution of payment types (debit, credit, wallet), retailers gain valuable insights. Additionally, analysing geographical trends and fraud patterns further strengthens their position. Armed with this comprehensive data, retailers can present a compelling case for lower fees, ultimately leading to significant cost savings and improved profit margins.

Financial Health

Finally, accurate financial records are paramount for any business. Payment data serves as a reliable source for accounting purposes, ensuring transparency and facilitating smooth financial operations. This financial health allows retailers to re-invest in their omnichannel strategy, further enhancing the customer experience.                                                                                                                                            

By leveraging payment data for financial insights, retailers can optimise their inventory management, streamline logistics, and identify areas for cost reduction. This financial health ultimately translates into a better customer experience through improved product availability, faster delivery times, and potentially, lower prices. Good payment data also helps with automatic reconciliation and back-office activities.

ROI of Leveraging Payment Data

Investment in payment data capabilities can help retailers boost the bottom line. By analysing payment data, retailers can unlock several insights that translate to significant ROI. This data-driven approach empowers retailers to move beyond guesswork and base their decisions on concrete facts. With the help of payment data retailers can measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion uplift, cost savings, and customer satisfaction with pinpoint accuracy.

Additionally, the data collected across different channels (online, mobile app, physical stores), enable retailers to gain a clear picture of which channels are performing best. This knowledge empowers them to optimise resource allocation, invest in high-performing areas, and potentially phase out underperforming channels. Understanding best-performing points of sale allows for targeted marketing campaigns and inventory management strategies, resulting in a strong return on investment.

Challenges in getting good-quality payment data

While payment data offers undeniable benefits, retailers often face the challenges in gathering data from various sources. Different payment processors use different data formats and levels of detail, creating a great level of inconsistency and distorting valuable trends and insights. There are existing solutions to bridge these data gaps, but they might not work for all processors. Building a custom solution in-house could solve this, but it can be complex and expensive.

This complexity often leads retailers to focus on basic reports of past transactions, rather than analysing future trends. The key is to unlock the hidden insights within this data. By harmonising the data from different sources, retailers can transform this into a clear picture. This allows them to move beyond simple reporting and use payment data to proactively analyse trends and make strategic decisions based on real insights.

Retailers that prioritise the strategic use of payment data gain a crucial advantage: foresight. By analysing customer behaviour trends and identifying potential blind spots in their business, retailers can adapt and optimise their omnichannel strategy to meet evolving customer needs. This proactive approach ensures they remain relevant and competitive in the retail world.

How can we help?

At PaymentVibes, we bridge the gap between business strategy and execution for retail merchants by enhancing payment capabilities, enabling faster achievement of business objectives. Our unique blend of retail experience and deep payment industry knowledge allows us to elevate your payment organization and tailor our expertise to your business needs.

Contact us for a discovery discussion.

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Security

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

 

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

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Industry Regulations

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

 

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Coaching & Training

Mentoring & Coaching

The role of a Payment Expert or Payment Lead has become increasingly crucial in the wake of Digital Transformation and the rise of Omnichannel Retail. Developing this multi-disciplinary expertise, however, is challenging – and many professionals are learning ‘on the go’.

We will help you:

  • Develop tailored one-to-one coaching with sessions designed to meet the specific needs of each team member.
  • Empower payment leaders with strategic insights and operational skills needed to shape and implement a successful payment strategy.
  • Offer cross-functional training to help leaders understand the pivotal role of payments in modern commerce, the interdependencies with other business functions, and the importance of strategic investment in this area for long-term success.
Coaching & Training

Custom Training Programs

At PaymentVibes, we recognise that every company has unique business needs. Our training programs are customised to meet your specific challenges and goals.

We will help you:

  • Create tailored training content that aligns with your organisation’s objectives and operational needs.
  • Provide flexible delivery options such in-person workshops, virtual sessions and on-demand courses.
  • Develop essential skills across technical, operational, and strategic areas, empowering your team to embrace the power of payments.
Projects

Item 5

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

 

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Projects

Item 4

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

 

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Projects

Item 3

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

 

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Projects

Project Management

In the world of payments, numerous functions within a company are impacted, ranging from business and technology teams to finance back-office, legal and security. Successful implementation of payment projects, whether upgrading existing systems or introducing new solutions, requires strong project governance and coordinated project management to ensure seamless execution while addressing the diverse needs of stakeholders involved.

We will help you:

  • Gather business requirements and develop a compelling business case to secure support from key business partners
  • Define project objectives, governance and milestones and validate them with key stakeholders to establish alignment
  • Coordinate project delivery within the agreed budget and timeline
  • Effectively communicate project progress with key stakeholders, fostering transparency and maintaining engagement throughout the implementation process
Projects

Implementation Support

Ensuring smooth implementation is key to the success of your payment project.

We will help you:

  • Solutions Setup: Assisting with the configuration and deployment of new payment solutions for a seamless start.
  • Training and Onboarding: Offering tailored training to equip your team with the skills needed to operate the new systems effectively.
  • Testing and Validation: Performing end-to-end testing to identify and resolve issues before go live.
  • Go-Live Support: Providing on-site or remote support during launch to ensure a smooth, trouble-free transition.
Consulting

Vendor Selection

As an independent consultancy company, we assist you in selecting payment services providers that align with your business model and operational needs. Our commitment to objectivity means we maintain independence from commercial relationships with payment providers to provide unbiased vendor assessment and selection.

We will help you:

  • Collect and analyse your business requirements, ensuring they align with your business model, sales channels and target markets
  • Translate your business requirements into specific capabilities and prepare the required documentation for the tender process
  • Offer a clear and comprehensive overview of each vendor, along with recommendations on which vendor(s) would be the most suitable partners for your business
  • Achieve satisfactory and sustainable outcome through our support in negotiating the contractual agreements
Consulting

Fraud Prevention

Leveraging payment technologies and data analytics are essential for retailers to combat fraud while maximising acceptance of legitimate transactions. By developing an effective technology strategy, harnessing data intelligence, and establishing effective organisational structures, retailers can strike the right balance between revenue generation and risk management in an automated and scalable way.

We will help you:

  • Enhance fraud management decisioning and improve financial performance by increasing sales and protecting your bottom line
  • Scale up fraud prevention operations through automation in approval rates, fraud detection and chargeback management
  • Elevate customer experience in an era of expanding digital payments and omnichannel journeys
  • Gain valuable insights and understanding from key performance indicators (KPIs) related to fraud prevention
  • Stay updated on the rapid developments in trends and regulations within the industry
Consulting

Data

Payment data is an untapped value for retailers. By understanding and monitoring relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), merchants can effectively acquire new customers, increase customer spending, enhance return on investment (ROI) of their marketing campaigns and loyalty programs, optimise fees and improve vendor strategies.

We will help you:

  • Evaluate your payment processes and determine relevant payment KPIs for your unique business model
  • Elevate customer experience through analytics that assess conversion rates, channel performance and effectiveness of payment methods and services
  • Improve effectiveness of your acquisition, retention, and loyalty strategies by analysing data related to customer lifecycle management, customer acquisition costs and customer shopping behaviour
  • Enable better data-driven decisions by gaining insights into customer behaviour across all sales channels
Consulting

Strategy

Payments became a critical component of retail value chain where customer experience is the new gold, frictionless payments drive sales conversion and payment technologies enable rapid go-to-market and scalable growth. A well-defined and executed payment strategy that encompasses the entire payment value chain is a key enabler for companies to gain competitive edge

We will help you:

  • Formulate your vision & strategy for payments that aligns with your business strategic priorities
  • Establish a target operating model to effectively execute your payment strategy
  • Identify the right payment solutions that align with your unique business model
  • Develop an effective communication strategy tailored to key stakeholder groups
  • Create a strategic roadmap to guide your payment initiatives
Consulting

Customer Experience

The paradigm shift in customer expectations for shopping ANYTIME, ANYWHERE and on ANY DEVICE positions payments as a strategic lever of growth. By strategically leveraging the power of payments, companies can develop and execute digital strategies that deliver an unparalleled payment experience across all customer touchpoints.  

We will help you:

  • Respond to rapidly evolving customer expectations in payments services for frictionless digital purchasing experience across all channels
  • Establish robust omnichannel payment foundations to enhance the speed of go-to-market for new digital payment services
  • Identify new payment methods and services based on your customer demographics and segmentation
  • Optimise your customer acquisition, conversion and retention strategies
  • Streamline and digitise user experience and operational processes throughout organisation