As Chase Paymentech’s market focus addresses key issues in the payment industry and explores industry trends and best practices, the company is well versed in providing powerful reporting, reconciliation, knowledge and expertise on various payment-related topics. In your opinion, what are the key factors that merchants should consider in order to achieve success in Europe?
Shane Fitzpatrick: E-commerce professionals are tasked with ensuring that their organisation can sell seamlessly to customers globally and provide a pleasant and frustration free shopping experience from purchase to fulfillment. This is a challenge with the expectations on e-commerce professionals delivering:
1. the right payment type to customers across multiple countries; 2. a checkout experience with reliable technology that’s always-on; 3. secure storage of customer data, encrypted and complying with regulations and 4. sufficient controls to minimise fraud whilst maximising cart conversion.
Taking care of these issues within the context of trying to grow the business can be a tough challenge. For Chase Paymentech, it’s business as usual. We take the time to build relationships with our merchants and understand their business, plans and challenges. With this insight we leverage our expertise and experience to deliver the right solutions for their business. In my experience, our innovative reporting and associated products have helped to significantly streamline back-office processes resulting in enhanced customer experience. We put our entire team and their experience at our clients’ disposal.
How does Chase Paymentech help merchants focus on growing their business?Shane Fitzpatrick: Our merchant’s strategy is our strategy - merchants are at the heart of everything we do. The breadth and strength of our experience enables us to share best practices and benchmarking with clients, helping them to focus on growing their business in a fast, compliant, secure and customer focused way. We regularly ask merchants for feedback to ensure that we are focused on what’s important to them. Our customers tell us that they are pleased with our technology, people, international reach and understanding of their business needs. They prove this by choosing Chase Paymentech as their ongoing payments and acquiring partner.
According to your Forrester’s1 research, nearly 88 percent of online shoppers have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing their transaction. In your opinion, what are the main keys to maximizing merchants` cart conversion rates and optimize sales?Shane Fitzpatrick: It is clear that consumers are becoming increasingly demanding online and expect their shopping experience to be simple and smooth. The fewer pages your customer has to visit to complete a transaction and the smoother the checkout flow, the more likely it appears that they will complete their purchase. Anything a shopper finds frustrating, unexpected, or slow may turn away potential sales. As the customer experience is key, online retailers must understand the need for a seamless and pleasant shopping experience (including order management, fulfillment and payment) to achieve maximum sales and repeat business. Anything that gives customers a chance to reconsider their purchase could be detrimental to cart conversion. Three main factors that have an impact on successful cart conversion include:
1. Long checkout flows: too many steps between item selection and ultimate payment (two is always better than four) can cause cart abandonment –solutions such as tokenisation may help 2. Slow payment authorisation: the need to visit another site to gain payment authorisation can be frustrating – solutions such as the Maestro Advanced Registration Program (MARP) prevent this slowdown in the payment process3. Expired cards and re-key requests: getting customers to re-key card details because they’re out of date is time consuming and tiresome. Ensuring customer card information is up to date and stored in a secure manner adhering to all compliance regulations will stop this from happening.
As with all payment solutions, it is always best to discuss your growth strategy with your payment provider to ensure that you are informed and properly aligned.
More and more consumers are demanding the ability to pay via multiple channels. How can merchants enable their business to benefit from all facets of multi-channel trade without the costs of connecting to multiple payment suppliers?Shane Fitzpatrick: With a growing number of consumers shopping via laptops and mobile devices, we can expect shoppers to frequently switch between channels. While many find it convenient to start their shopping journey on their computer or mobile phone, they may prefer to use another channel to research, buy and collect their purchase. This presents both an opportunity and a threat for retailers to find ways to differentiate their offering from high street competitors by offering a consistent and seamless online and mobile shopping experience.
It is vital to work with your acquiring partner to ensure that they understand your business and your growth needs. Offering a single source solution with integrated reporting can go a long way to help and monthly reconciliation can reduce back office costs.
With online fraud constantly evolving, fighting such a threat becomes a complex challenge. How can retailers find the best combination of solutions to stay ahead of fraudsters on a global basis?
Shane Fitzpatrick: Working smarter and looking for new ways to identify and block fraudulent attempts can help retailers stay ahead. There are many tools and practices that merchants can leverage to mitigate the risk of fraud. The challenge is to leverage those most appropriate.
A superior fraud prevention strategy will also consider the number of legitimate orders that are rejected on suspicion of fraud. By accepting more ‘good’ orders first time round, the customer experience and merchant sales orders will inevitably improve.
Your payments and acquiring partner should be able to guide merchants on how to analyse trends and implement fraud prevention tools. Chase Paymentech advises merchants on tools and practices used to identify and combat fraud. Insights on country specific threats and analysis together with risk based scores for certain transactions are powerful ways to help merchants develop their fraud and payments strategy. Empowering your review team may also bring savings. Maintaining a dedicated team of fraud analysts can be expensive. As sales grow, manual review teams may have an increasing number of orders to review daily. A dedicated fraud management system, like Chase Paymentech’s SafetechSM Fraud Tools, can help by integrating fraud prevention and payment acquiring together to provide fraud analysts with the intelligence about each transaction on one screen.
With the growth of mobile shopping, social media and technologies such as tablets and smartphones, new patterns of fraud are emerging. Evidence shows that retailers strongly believe that fraud levels will increase in the next few years as these channels become more widely adopted. To keep up, fraud prevention methods will also evolve.
Finally, in order to maintain and grow consumer confidence it is important to plan strategically to ensure that you can detect fraud across all channels as close to real time as possible. Fraud prevention is an ongoing and organic smart investment.
International expansion is central to a company`s growth, but each region presents specific challenges when it comes to payments. What are the key factors that companies should consider when planning to expand overseas?
Shane Fitzpatrick: When it comes to payments and international expansion, merchants need to consider:
• Reach: Can I access as many customers as possible?• Method of Payment: Do I offer the most popular method of payment for customers?• Security: Are my payment types secure?• Fraud: What are the related fraud risks and how can I mitigate against them?• Funding: How quickly will I receive funding for the sales I make?• Reconciliation: How will I reconcile my sales orders to cash received? • Business Intelligence: Can I get real insight from the data I process? • Refunds, Credits and Chargebacks: How can they be managed and processed?• Payment Providers: Is there one provider who can support all my payments and acquiring needs?• Regulation and Compliance: How can I be assured that my solution is compliant with payment brand regulations and legal requirements?
With so much to consider, merchants may question the benefit of international expansion. The answer is, if managed appropriately, there can be significant value to merchants trading across multi-channels and internationally.
The growth in international is driven partly by an increase in customer confidence in the security of online shopping, particularly with the emergence of fraud prevention tools such as Verify by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode®. In today’s price sensitive market, consumers want to be reassured that they are getting the best value and price as well as being able to shop anywhere, anytime.
The consumer shopping experience is an important consideration for international expansion too. In Spain, for example, consumers like to browse online before shopping in-store with a high value placed on touching and feeling products before purchase. Italians, however, are wary of giving card details due to a fear of their card being compromised.
Working with a payments partner with a proven track record and success in international markets is vital. For over twenty-five years, Chase Paymentech has played an integral role in the growth of some of the world’s leading e-commerce merchants as they developed from humble beginnings to the world renowned companies they are today.
What do you see as the biggest challenges for retailers’ growth over the next years?Shane Fitzpatrick: The growth of e-commerce, internationalisation, multicurrency and social networking have created new opportunities, but also challenges, relating to regulation, security and fraud. There are cultural issues to consider, handling foreign credit cards and multiple currencies and dealing with exchange rates too. Chase Paymentech has the expertise and knowledge to advise merchants how to overcome these.
1 Forrester Research: Understanding shopping cart abandonment (May 2010)
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