In the recent past, there was a tectonic shift in the digital landscape ecosystem, which has unlocked the massive potential of a digital economy. More and more customers realize the convenience offered by digital payments. Still, it was considered a luxury or choice by many consumers who still used cash or cards for transactions.
As a result, merchant payments are now an essential facility that customers expect from large retail outlets, smaller stores, and from online shopping destinations. Digitizing merchant payments represents a major opportunity for financial services providers in developing economies because small retailers around the world accept an enormous amount of cash payments annually.
So, if you are dealing with merchant payments, then this is the best time for you to invest into a profitable merchant payment solution. But before you start developing a successful digital payment solution, you should understand it better.
Why digitization of merchant payment is the best bet?
Digitization is affecting retail business and making it tougher for traditional merchants to stay in the competition. This is mainly because customers face a lot of trouble and hurdles in case of traditional payment methods. Digitizing payment helps the businesses to overcome the physical barriers that have beset otherwise valuable financial inclusion efforts.
Because of the highly competitive payment market scenario, a creative and granular approach is needed to overcome the last-mile barriers to digital payments. Digital payments offer several benefits that help retail stores to streamline their operations and offer a rich shopping experience. Let us see this benefits one by one:
1. Better accessibility and convenience
Convenience becomes important when it comes to payment. If your customers find it hard to make the payment, chances are there they may not come back to you. Digitizing your payments can be the best bet for you as they can help you offer a convenient payment experience to the customers.
Digital merchant wallet solutions allow your customer to make credit purchases with the help of the ‘Pay Later’ facility. Apart from this, you can automatically collect money after a specific period instead of sending constant payment reminders to customers.
2. Minimal risk of theft
‘Cash is the king’ is a popular phrase in the business world, but this king is not free from limitations. If you are accepting payments via cash from customers, chances are there it can be stolen.
But this risk can be eliminated by making a highly secure digital payment system. With a feature-rich digital payment system, you do not have to worry about your payment security as it enables multiple payment security measures.
3. Seamless checkout process
Today’s customer expects a smoother checkout process that helps them to pay in a hassle-free manner. If the checkout process is cumbersome and time-consuming, then they don’t hesitate to abandon their purchases. Here a merchant wallet app is of great help.
A merchant payment solution eliminates long queue lines and helps the retailers to manage store traffic at checkout points efficiently. Besides this, a merchant payment solution proves to be handy during weekends or holidays when there will be a great rush of customers. This would eventually create a positive experience for your customers.
4. Offer multiple payment options to customers
A robust digital payment solution allows you to offer various methods to your customers such as mobile wallet, credit card, debit card, QR code, NFC, etc. Besides this, you can allow your customers to pay via QR codes or One-Time Passwords (OTP).
You can use contactless POS terminals in your business to avoid the human touch. In this system, the payee needs to hold his phone near the terminal and his payment will get automatically processed.
Steps to automate merchant payments
Access to affordable merchant payment solutions brings financial stability and growth for those who are otherwise vulnerable to cash flow volatility and suffer from constrained access to capital to grow. And this can have a profound impact on the growth of your business.
Here are the steps to automate your merchant payments:
1. Identify the challenges with payments
It’s important to have a payment processor that can easily troubleshoot any financial problems you might be facing. But first you need to identify the challenges with payment collection. Also, you need to get clear with the limitations of traditional payment methods.
Digital solutions were adopted to record deliveries, invoice and collect from customers, and reconcile month-end accounts. Apart from this, a digital payment solution can provide you with a digital record of your transactions, which you can save into your cloud storage to view it later.
2. Make a cutting edge digital payment solution
To make your customer’s life easier, you need to integrate a unique feature rich digital payment solution into your business. This will shorten the transaction time for your customer, which eventually results in better revenues and shorter queues.
A digital payment solution offers you with multiple features such as money withdrawal, accurate analytics, built-in loyalty module, 24*7 assistance, etc. Besides this, it also helps you to view all the transactions that had taken place throughout the day. You can even check out your wallet balance too.
3. Harness innovative technologies to secure your payments
You can integrate advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning, tokenization, sound wave technology, biometric authentication and blockchain tools to save your merchant wallet app from scam and frauds.
The abovementioned technologies can identify fraudulent patterns and later apply them to check its authenticity. It helps FinTech firms to take preventive actions in real-time, which include informing the concerned party or to block the transaction entirely in an extreme scenario.
4. Implement attractive customer loyalty programmes
Customer retention is a tough task for every business. And a digital payment solution makes this task easier for payment businesses. This is because an automated payment solution enables the admin to integrate various types of loyalty and rewards programs.
Retailers can offer various discounts, promo offers, rewards, loyalty points, and many more. These loyalty programs keep the customers satisfied and engaged, along with strengthening your customer retention ratio.
Conclusion
Merchant payments leverages a great operability in payments and create value through partnerships and specialization rather than keeping everything in house. It would lay the foundation for an extensive digital ecosystem and build a strategy around the use of data and the importance of being the primary interface between customers and their money.
Payment providers who understand this will craft an amazing agent & merchant payment app that leads toward a long-term vision. The ones who do not just might not be around when the future comes to pass.
