Consumer preferences are constantly changing. People want hybrid shopping (both online and in-store) and are craving innovative and flexible cross-channel experiences consisting of physical and digital.
Convenience is a key aspect driving this trend. Consumers want to find what they are looking for and pay without a hassle. This is often a challenge for retailers selling furniture, sports equipment, or electronics. Consumers often need to pick up the product in one place and bring it to the checkout to pay or purchase a product in store and then pick it up from a collection point, making the experience slow and inefficient.
To solve this, businesses are adapting to their customers' needs and enhancing their payment experiences by offering services such as click-and-collect, self-checkout, endless aisles, and mobile point of sales (mPOS) solutions. These innovations provide customers with the cross-channel and in-store experiences they expect.
Unfortunately, many of the retailers in these industries work with legacy providers. Their siloed data and innumerable integrations make launching and maintaining these flexible cross-channel customer experiences difficult.
In this article, you'll discover the top innovations for businesses in these industries that can help them enhance the payment experience for their customers and learn how to overcome the challenges of working with a legacy provider.
Innovations that shape the future of retail
Customers crave experiences that make their buying journey as smooth and flexible as possible. Retailers are turning to different innovations to accommodate those needs. Below are some considerations for retailers that want to enhance cross-channel and in-store experiences.
Cross-channel experiences:
Click-and-collect
Creating cross-channel experiences is a top priority for retailers. Consumers want a combination of digital and physical experiences that allow them to move between channels and pick up where they left off. This is often referred to as a click-and-mortar business model, which is when businesses have both in-store and online stores.
As part of the click-and-mortar business model, click-and-collect emerges as a true cross-channel experience that allows customers to reserve a product online and pick it up in store. For instance, while shopping in a furniture store, we all know the struggle of navigating and finding the product we’re looking for in such a large store. Customers prefer browsing through catalogs, making the purchase online, and collecting it physically in store.
Endless aisles
Endless aisles allow customers to purchase out-of-stock products in-store and deliver them to their houses. This will allow retailers to close the deal even if the product isn't available, reducing out-of-stock limitations.
Referenced refunds
Referenced refunds allow retailers to offer the flexibility of omnichannel returns. Every payment has a unique reference that allows retailers to keep track of payments and refunds. This enables them to accept returns in store regardless of whether the product was bought at the point of sale or online.
In-store experiences:
Self-checkout
Self-checkout kiosks are an easy way to increase efficiency while enhancing the payment experience. This is a top priority for retailers that want to avoid checkout lines. With self-checkout, they can redesign their in-store checkout experience by improving checkout speed while reducing queues and the need for in-store personnel.
Pay anywhere in store
With mPOS, store employees can move around freely and accept payments anywhere in the store the moment their customers are ready to buy, creating a more convenient and effortless buying experience.
This is especially valuable for retailers that sell big products such as furniture, electronics, or sports equipment. Buying a piece of furniture might already feel like a hassle. What is even more inconvenient is needing to drag this product across the store, stand in line at the check out, and try to fit it through. mPOS solutions solve this challenge and create a more effortless experience for customers.
Preferred payment methods in store
An important aspect of enhancing the payment experience is to offer customers preferred payment methods. In fact, data about customers leaving the store if they can't pay how they want. One payment method that is popular is Buy Now Pay Later for in-store payments. Furniture or consumer electronics products have a high average transaction value (ATV). By offering BNPL, businesses make it more affordable and easier for consumers to buy such products. With payments innovation retailers can offer BNPL in physical stores at the point of sale, where the majority of transactions happen.
The challenges of legacy infrastructure
Since many retailers work with legacy providers, they often struggle to offer their customers these experiences. The siloed data and innumerable integrations make launching and maintaining these customer experiences difficult.
Offering cross-channel experiences becomes especially challenging when the backend isn’t unified, compounded by different payment systems for online and in-store channels. This necessitates independently managing separate inventory levels, pricing, and promotions for each sales channel.
Disconnected systems prevent seamless movement across channels and hinder the implementation of services such as endless aisles if inventory is disconnected. They also lead to data siloing, hampering cross-channel customer behavior analysis and resulting in poor insights. These insights are crucial to offering your customers what they want.
Without these insights, retailers face the challenge of creating effective loyalty programs. This is important for pet stores which have high repeat transactions. Some may happen in-store, some online. Understanding cross channel behavior becomes critical to recognizing customers across channels and offering valuable loyalty programs.
Enhancing payment experiences with a unified payments solution
To offer customers the flexible cross-channel experiences they expect, businesses must move away from legacy tech infrastructure to a single solution connecting all their channels in the backend.
With Adyen's unified commerce solution, data from all your channels and systems feed into one centralized platform for a more unified view of your stock, customers, and payments. This gives you better insights into your customers and operations, ultimately leading to better decisions.
Our single platform makes it easy to provide your customers with enhanced cross-channel experiences, such as self-service checkouts, endless aisles, click and collect, reserve and collect, and mPOS.
Are you ready to increase efficiency and enhance the in-store experience? Get in touch.
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