How A Complex Mobile Payment Process Can Ruin A Relationship

Here’s a retail passion killer if ever I heard one: ‘On average, it takes 150 taps to buy something on your mobile phone.’ 1

Not only that, but: ‘50% of potential customers abandon the mobile checkout process because they find it’s too difficult’1, and: ‘On Black Friday, mobile accounted for 60% of online traffic but only 24% of sales.’2

Clearly, no matter how intense the urge to own those outrageous Jimmy Choos, this egregious wallpaper, or that ostentatious timepiece, if the purchase process is too long and complex your prospective customers are going to love you and leave you. They’ll cut and run to one of your leaner, fitter, more accommodating rivals without a backward glance.

Mobile commerce could be worth $1 trillion by 2017 3

It’s not just about securing the online basket, though. Mobile phone payment may be a massive retail opportunity and a force for good, but there are other meaty problems we need to get to grips with.    

First, businesses are becoming harder to pin down. Car  manufacturers are also car retailers, retailers are busy launching banks, while crowdsourcing is becoming the main means of arranging accommodation and transport (Airbnb and Uber).

Second, because they’re competing with data-driven e-commerce businesses, most contenders need to up their game. They need to find out exactly who their customers are as individuals, then build commercial propositions around that detailed knowledge.

Third, the checkout problem isn’t limited to mobile devices. It’s in-store as well.

73% abandon in-store purchases if they have to wait more than five minutes to pay

In the face of these challenges, retailers need all the help they can get – particularly from mobile apps and in-store mobile technology. Developments like digital fitting rooms and mannequins, tablet-enabled sales assistants, facial recognition, Square, Google GOOGL +1.24% Wallet, Near Field Communication (mobile devices push information to each other based on location), clienteling, Geofencing (a virtual fence around a store which detects when opt-in customers enter the area), social media, and Big Data analytics, all drive data that retailers can capitalise on.

So, as customers walk the aisles of mobile-enabled, bricks-and-mortar stores, proprietary apps provide timely offers that relate to goods they see on the shelves in front of them, as well as product comparisons, navigational aids, and stock availability.

And the key to sustainability is linking the transactional experience to the social experience. By capturing and analysing customer preferences, we can use Big Data principles to personalise the in-store experience and to respond to the ensuing reaction. In other words, turning detailed personas and brand loyalties into a till-jingling bottom line that breaks away from unsustainable and counter-productive, slash-price competition.

The 73% of shoppers who abandon their purchases cost British retailers £1.04 billion so this whole subject is an urgent priority. Developments like enhanced mobile checkouts and electronic-payment apps can smooth customer acceptance of retailers collecting data (such as an e-mail address) via mobile technology. This way, the request for an e-mail address is seamless and much more effective, giving a compliant thumbs-up for marketing use.

Customers accept mobile checkouts easily and very quickly, because the advantages are obvious and immediate. However, relationship-based technologies like push notifications need discounts and unique offers to help customers buy into the concept. That said, if they trust the brand, the majority of consumers are happy to share their personal information.

So, clearly, if data management and analytics aren’t top of the retail-boardroom agenda, customer break-ups could become permanent. And each acquisition or retention programme will be reduced to the equivalent of an inept fumble in the dark – not even a one-night-stand.

Never mind a long-term, lovin’ relationship.

SOURCE: Forbes