We have another great contribution to our eCommerce theme from Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap. Ralph provides insights into cross-boarder payments and the importance of a company's payment gateway.
Ralph Dangelmaier is CEO of BlueSnap, where he is leading the charge to establish BlueSnap as the payments leader in e-commerce. A payment processing veteran, Ralph brings a wealth of experience creating products for retailers, processors and financial institutions and has a proven track record of growing companies both organically and through M&A activity. Under his stewardship, companies have successfully capitalized on the rapid growth in commerce to increase their revenue and stock value. Ralph has more than 25 years of experience in strategy, marketing, sales, and revenue, product, SaaS, development and delivery services for global customer base. Most recently, Ralph served as the President of Global Markets and Services for ACI Worldwide, a global provider of electronic payment software and solutions.
In 10 years, we will no longer make a distinction between ecommerce and m-commerce. Instead, we will distinguish between merchants that make payments easy, and merchants that don’t. Companies will drop outdated payment gateways like flies as they realize that conversions and sales can’t grow when their checkout process has more fields and bubbles than an SAT exam.
In the same way that credit cards created a ‘one-swipe’ system around the world, payment gateways are striving towards a ‘one-tap’ system that works with every computer, mobile device, wearable and soon enough, every storefront checkout system.
Regardless of whether your customers wear Google Glass or a chip surgically stitched into your arm in 10 years, you will need one global checkout experience to rule every channel. It will need these three characteristics:
1. Localized Shopping Experiences Anywhere in the World
To succeed in global ecommerce, you need to provide the payment options that customers actually use. In China, for instance, Alibaba’s Alipay online payment system processed $519 billion in payments in 2013. In Brazil, people like to make credit card payment in installments or use Boleto Bancário, a cash-like brank transfer system. When you can’t offer these local payment methods, you lose buyers. Indeed, vouchercloud found that 59 percent of consumers will abandon a transaction if their preferred payment method is not in place. Only 27 percent of U.S. ecommerce merchants are set up to sell internationally, according to the MCM Outlook 2014 Survey from Multichannel Merchant. So if you get international payments right, you will acquire customers that your competitors can’t touch.
2. Checkout Has to Be Simple On Every Device
If you want to increase conversions, you must provide a fast checkout process on every device. Today, most ecommerce sites provide decent checkout experiences on desktops, but mobile checkout is more frustrating than a trip to the DMV. The experience is long, cumbersome and liable to fail if anything happens to the internet connection. According to an infographic from Baynote, m-commerce is outpacing traditional ecommerce growth by 200 percent. If you want to still be competitive in 10 years, you need to:
a) Have people enter billing info just once, and then save it to a secure profile
b) Let people then buy in one tap
You’re losing shoppers if your mobile payments are any more difficult.
3. Bring Online Payments into Brick-and-Mortar Stores
If you can make mobile payments a one-tap process anywhere in the world, you can also replace typical cash and credit card payments in brick-and-mortar stores. This can make checkout faster, reduce operational costs and create mobile marketing opportunities. Starbucks has led the pack with in-store mobile payments. According to PaymentsSource, the coffee giant receives 11 percent of U.S. and Canadian payments via its mobile app. It’s easy to see restaurants and retailers follow suit with apps and payment gateways that enable consumers to clear the checkout process in one-tap. And as companies get more consumers paying on mobile, they can begin to target mobile offers by geolocation and spending habits. Thus, mobile commerce may enable merchants to cut spending on POS systems and staff while increasing sales with better marketing and rewards programs.
The less consumers notice your payment gateway, the better. If you make cross-border payments, mobile and storefront transactions easier, and people will spend more and return to your stores more often. Wherever and however you sell, funnel the entire customer experience into one checkout system that can rule them all.