How consolidation helps retailers expand payment options, reduce costs, enhance customer experiences

Countless retailers today simply have too many payments providers.

Whether for supporting transactions across individual sales channels, expanding into new geographic markets, or acquiring a new payment method capability, retailers have accumulated a growing roster of payments providers for each line of business, each regional market where they want to transact, or to acquire a specific capability not offered by their existing vendors.

The result is a maze of payment technology vendors capable of supporting only the needs of an individual channel, use case, or geography, as well as less flexibility across the broader business to support better customer and checkout experiences. This disjointed approach to processing payments poses numerous operational and customer service challenges, among them:

• An abundance of payment providers increases technical debt. The integrations needed for each provider must be maintained on an ongoing basis as additional payment methods are introduced or new compliance regulations emerge.
• Multiple providers mean payment analytics and reports in varying formats, making it difficult for executives to get a cohesive view of sales and performance across the organization. This also poses real hardships for customer service representatives challenged with figuring out which processor was used when managing incoming inquiries or refund requests.
• Finally, dealing with many vendor contracts creates management headaches. It occupies precious time and resources of internal teams responsible for reviewing and analyzing vendor quality. There is also a good chance the retailer won't get the vendor's best price since volume is spread across multiple vendors.

Addressing and overcoming these challenges requires retailers to un-silo and consolidate the number of payment providers they are using. Doing so will reduce operational costs and technical complexity, and enhance customer experiences in the following ways:

Creating continuity and consistency

To increase sales and address checkout abandonment issues, retailers need to provide payment experiences that allow customers to pay with their preferred payment method and currency - all while making sure the experience is consistent across channels. Often, they cobble together solutions to make this work. By consolidating payments vendors, retailers can enable customers to purchase goods and services via their preferred method, while ensuring a consistent experience no matter the channel, use case, or geographic location.

Additionally, new payment methods can be introduced across the organization more efficiently, ensuring all customers can benefit no matter how they choose to transact. Finally, merchants can more easily collect and leverage valuable data analytics that can inform substantive and meaningful customer interactions and help widen the addressable market, increasing sales and brand loyalty.

Leveraging global payments orchestration

By consolidating with a provider that offers modern and advanced global payment orchestration capabilities, retailers of any size can introduce new payment methods, enter new markets, dynamically route payments to avoid international processing charges and, generally, experience positive impacts to the bottom line.

With payment orchestration, retailers can increase revenue by reducing failed transactions while, at the same time, having a robust redundancy and failover capability to guard against outages, unpredictable changes in acquiring bank business acceptance policies, or issuing bank declines. As an additional benefit, retailers can gain access to payments capabilities for a range of specific business use cases including subscriptions, invoicing, and marketplaces.

A better experience for customers

For customer service representatives and the whole of the support function, the benefits of a consolidated payments environment are numerous. With a singular system, agents can easily and quickly access customer payment information, thereby reducing time spent on each inquiry and ultimately enhancing the overall efficiency of the call center. Because new agents will only have to familiarize themselves with one system, training and onboarding of new agents can happen faster while the negative impacts of turnover are minimized.

To be clear, the consolidation process is not without challenges. There are always inherent risks in migrating data and converging systems. The algorithms that dictate how payments are trafficked across multiple providers will need to be reworked. The possibility of payment systems downtime increases as the convergence process takes place. It would not be advisable to undertake such an initiative during peak times of the season.

But at the end of the day, these challenges are certainly manageable, and the benefits will dramatically outweigh the risks. As payment technologies and consumer purchasing preferences evolve, adopting a holistic approach to payments and reducing payment vendors will enable any retailer to seamlessly conduct business wherever they choose with minimized complexity and decreased cost.