Peak season payments acceptance: top tips

Retailers spend months preparing for peak season: purchasing stock, designing attractive store layouts, crafting engaging adverts and promotions, increasing staff numbers and working hours, and identifying ways to boost customer throughput. However, payments processing should also be a key part of these peak trading preparations. Overlooking this is a significant mistake, as payments are the final step in the purchasing journey. The payments experience has a direct impact on revenue generation, basket abandonment rates and customer satisfaction ratings.

Top tips from leading merchants

As a trusted payments partner for many leading retailers, we can share best practices on ways to improve the user experience (UX), reduce queues, boost acceptance rates, and streamline the management returns.

However, it’s important to remember that it is not only retailers who have been busy planning for peak trading, criminals have as well. They see the increased purchasing activity, volume of online shopping, and additional calls upon a consumer’s time and attention, as the perfect opportunity to initiate scams, commit fraud attacks, and exploit any vulnerabilities. Due to the high brand recognition of British retailers, along with the number of eCommerce sites and volume of international sales, the UK retail market is a specific target for international fraudsters.

Improve the payments experience

Unnecessary friction should be removed from the payment journey wherever it appears. In-store, this can be achieved by implementing queue-busting acceptance points using portable payment terminals or by adding payment capabilities to smartphones and tablets already deployed in-store. This can now be enabled by deploying the latest ‘Tap on Mobile’ SoftPOS solutions. Simplifying the online check-out page and making UX improvements can have dramatic results, particularly for customers shopping on smartphones. Retailers are encouraged to adopt a ‘Mobile First’ strategy when developing their payments acceptance approach.

Ensuring you support digital payment wallets online as well as in-store will help deliver higher approval rates, a reduction in basket abandonment, and improved customer satisfaction levels. Digital wallets are now the favourite way for UK customers to pay online and have the added benefit of reducing the impact of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) challenges and declines.

International shoppers can make a significant contribution to revenue. That is why retailers should ensure they offer a broad range of international and local payment methods and consider implementing Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC).

Pay later

With consumers facing greater pressures on their disposal income during the holidays period, and heightened demand not to miss out on special promotional offers, it is critical to offer a range of pay-later options. You should expect to see more credit card transactions at this time of year, despite fewer millennials having credit cards compared to previous generations. This is why you need to offer compelling instalment payment and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options from a range of providers. BNPL allows the cost of larger items to be spread across several months and helpfully passes the credit risk on to the finance provider.

However inversely at this time of year, you can also expect to see heightened demand for gift cards, both in a physical format for purchase in-store, or for the eGift card variant. These solve the challenges of what to pick as a gift for family members or friends, make delivery easier and help with last-minute purchases.   

Cross-channel journeys

At this busy time of year, more customers will be engaging with your business across multiple sales channels. They may start by researching products on one device, before purchasing through another channel. Due to the importance of receiving goods by a set date, and the increased risk of couriers being overloaded, the ability to have a slick ‘Buy Online Pick-up In-store’ (BOPIS) process is critical. Equally merchants need to be ready to handle an increase in returns after Christmas and so your payment platforms need to work seamlessly together to process ‘Bought Online Return In-store’ (BORIS) transactions.

Resilience is key

With consumers now making over 80% of purchases in-store with digital payment methods, and cash accounting for only 12% of transactions, payments acceptance must be treated as a ‘Mission Critical’ service. Achieving high availability does not just happen, it must be planned for and built into each layer of the payment processing infrastructure. It requires close co-operation between multiple internal teams and with your external providers. Trading can continue smoothly if you support dual communication networks, utilise smart transaction routing, implement a multi- acquirer strategy, and are ready to use options like deferred authorisation.

Not too early for next year’s plan

It may be too late to make radical changes for this year’s peak trading period as your organisation may have a strict IT freeze policy, but it is never too early to start planning, and obtain the budget, for implementation in 2025. But many improvements can be achieved through better staff training and optimised operational processes. In February it will be helpful to conduct a thorough review of how well you handled peak trading this year to identify areas for improvement next year.

Conclusion

It is worth remembering that not all merchants have peak trading over the Golden Quarter and for these we recommend you do not wait, but rather start right away on improving your payments acceptance systems so that you are ready for your peak trading time.

All retailers are encouraged to plan meticulously for peak trading, conduct stress testing, and build greater resilience into their infrastructure. Three technologies we believe should be in your plans are ‘Tap on Mobile’, Network Tokens and Payments Orchestration. We welcome the opportunity to discuss these with you.

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