The Omnichannel Shopping Experience: How to Address Customer Preferences
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our already digitally-centric culture to become even more digitally-driven. People rely on their smartphones, social platforms and digital channels for information, entertainment and online shopping.
In the face of this digital transformation, consumers expect personalized service and convenience when shopping both online and in-store. This includes the ability to interact with a retailer anytime, anywhere, across multiple channels. To keep up, retailers need to offer an integrated omnichannel shopping experience that offers customers payment options.
“Payment choice is the number one feature buyers value, no matter where they are in the world,” concludes a study by PYMNTS and Cybersource, a Visa solution. “All consumers say that the ability to pay how they want is the most important feature that retailers offer.”
According to the report, consumers are 63% more likely to shop from merchants that offer their preferred payment options. Merchants clearly have a strong business incentive to offer their customers a full range of payment methods.
Providing consumers with payment and channel options
Fortunately, there are solutions that retailers can use to ensure they meet and even exceed shopper expectations for an integrated, holistic, and seamless shopping experience. For example, a shopper purchasing goods from their mobile device or laptop can request a curbside pickup. Accurate inventory management allows for efficient and accurate store-level fulfillment, and when available for pickup, the shopper can be automatically notified via push notification or text message to share the shopper’s estimated time of arrival or arrival time.
A crucial step in ensuring a smooth process is offering digital profiles that customers can access across multiple synchronous shopping channels. Digital profiles save individuals (both in-store and online) from having to re-enter information. These profiles also save account managers from retrieving profile data to facilitate a transaction. According to the Cybersource report, nearly two-thirds (65%) of US retailers offered such digital profiles in 2021, up from 52% in 2020.
The costly consciousness gap
Whether the consumer’s preferred payment method is credit card, debit card, digital wallet or eWallet, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) or online bank transfers, it is critical that merchants make customers aware that these options are available are. All other factors being equal, a person who prefers BNPL will take their purchase to a retailer that offers that skill.
Similarly, Cybersource data shows that 54% of US retailers allow shoppers to make purchases using voice-recognition technology like Alexa and Google Home. However, only 43% of local shoppers said the retailer they last shopped from offers this option. This “lack of awareness” can cost retailers in the form of lost sales opportunities.
Consumers no longer view shopping as an in-store or online experience. Technology has blurred the lines to enable a seamless consumer journey that effortlessly traverses multiple devices, platforms and channels.
To provide merchants with the shopping experiences customers expect, Cybersource works with partners such as Manhattan Associates, Inc. to create a unified experience that streamlines the process from front-end to checkout with Manhattan Active Omni®. Cybersource and partners work behind the scenes to ensure a seamless omnichannel experience, allowing merchants to benefit from complete flexibility.
Today’s consumers want a personalized shopping experience that includes the ability to pay through traditional and new channels and with the payment method of their choice. Merchants that offer this omnichannel shopping and payment experience gain a competitive advantage.
Learn more about Cybersource here.