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With the rapid evolution of omnichannel commerce, today’s merchants face increasing pressure to offer not only a wide variety of payment methods, but also frictionless payment experiences across every channel. Offering a single sales channel isn’t enough, and neither is simply offering multiple payment options. Now, every channel a merchant sells through needs to be synchronized and integrated in a way that allows the end customer to jump between channels without friction in their shopping or payments experiences.
It’s a tall order – one that most merchants can’t handle on their own. As a result, more are turning to leading payment service providers for help.
The growing demand for better omnichannel payment solutions represents a huge opportunity for savvy independent sales organizations (ISOs) and other payment professionals. Payment providers who can meet this challenge will unlock new sources of revenue and gain a stronger foothold in an evolving, competitive market.
So, what is the omnichannel opportunity, and how can payment providers use it to monetize more areas of their business while boosting the quality of their merchant services?
Omnichannel Commerce and the Future of Payments
Today, 84% of consumers prioritize convenience when choosing a payment method. But the demand for convenience goes far beyond payments; consumers expect it in all areas of their shopping experience. Whether they’re shopping in-store or online, doing research on a website or clicking the buy button on a social media post, consumers demand unified, synchronous experiences across all channels.
On average, omnichannel shoppers make purchases 70% more often and spend 34% more money than their peers. Unsurprisingly, unified omnichannel orchestration is becoming a major priority for forward-thinking merchants, who are looking to their payment processing partners for the services, technology and guidance they need to expand their offerings.
For ISOs and payment providers, staying competitive means finding more than just a wider set of sales and payment channels; it’s also about making those channels work together seamlessly while being easy to set up, manage and monetize.
How ISOs and Payment Providers Can Monetize More Areas of Omnichannel Payments
The more sales channels an ISO or other payment professional can support, the more valuable a partner it becomes. That makes expanding omnichannel offerings a critical part of staying relevant and keeping merchants around for the long run.
Beyond the competitive advantages of offering broad omnichannel services, expanding into new channels and products creates opportunities to generate more value for merchants. Generating new business is important, but optimizing revenue from existing accounts is a far more efficient way to boost profits and drive growth —especially as gaining new customers can cost five times more than retaining existing ones.
The combination of stickier long-term relationships and higher average revenue is a powerful advantage in a market as tight as payment services. So, what areas can frontline payment providers use to create a wider omnichannel footprint, and why are they so important to the future?
Expanding Value-Added Services
One of the simplest ways payment providers can broaden the value and utility they offer merchants is to sell a wider set of value-added services. These add-on services, or extensions, have long been a key source of value to merchants and revenue to payment professionals in areas like fraud protection, but they also offer ways to boost omnichannel sales.
For example, a value-added service like NMI Customer Vault allows merchants to store credit card data and bill customers without worrying about compliance or taking on the risks or costs of a data breach. That opens the door for more small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to tap into recurring payments and account management across multiple channels, including online, in-store and mobile. Another option is Text-to-Pay, which provides merchants with access to SMS as a channel for sending invoices and receiving payments.
These are just two examples of how simple, easy-to-sell extensions can help merchants operate across multiple channels — especially if they’re already operating on a tight budget and can’t afford to find another partner to support extra payment features.
Entering New Channels
Omnichannel experiences are now a baseline consumer expectation, and soon, merchants will expect the same. For ISOs and other payment providers that have traditionally specialized in one or just a few channels, this shift will make competing extremely difficult. As a result, there’s no better time than now to enter new channels.
The three channels that are top of mind for most payment providers are online, in-store and mobile. Serving all three is a good goal for most ISOs and payment professionals. But, going further, providers looking to diversify can explore channels like unattended or even social commerce — a channel that is exploding on the wider global stage.
Partnering With Software Developers
The increasing importance of software-driven payments is a hot topic in the payments space, as growth in embedded solutions outpaces traditional channels by a wide margin. Many payment providers look at independent software vendors (ISVs) as competition to be fought off, but plenty of software companies start their payments journeys by partnering with traditional payment companies first. That makes partnerships a potentially lucrative opportunity.
Software companies already power payments for more than half of all merchants, and that trend will only accelerate in the future. By reframing the problem and turning a potential threat into an opportunity, traditional payment providers can tap into a wider base of omnichannel customers as the “man behind the curtain” for software-driven payments.
Finding Payment Partners That Prioritize Great Orchestration
Omnichannel commerce isn’t just the existence of multiple channels; it’s multiple channels all working together cohesively as one. Customers need to be able to effortlessly hop between channels for an experience to be truly considered omnichannel. If jumping from web to social media causes friction or if shopping online for pickup in-store isn’t seamless, the experience ultimately fails to meet the expectations of modern customers. That makes experience orchestration a crucial aspect of success.
Today, just 41% of retailers orchestrate the shopping experience across multiple channels. That isn’t surprising since orchestration is a difficult task that has generally been out of reach for all but the biggest platforms. However, today’s consumers expect a seamless experience from everyone, including small merchants, and will look elsewhere if those expectations aren’t met.
To make omnichannel payments more accessible to everyone — including SMBs — providers can offer merchants a wider variety of shopping experiences by partnering with one-stop payment platforms that prioritize orchestration, like NMI.
Frictionless Omnichannel Payments: Getting Started
NMI’s end-to-end payment solutions provide ISOs and payment specialists with everything they need to offer their merchants a complete, modern omnichannel payments experience. That means our partners can access the products and services they need to meet each merchant’s individual needs, no matter how, where or what they sell.
Partnering with NMI is the fastest, easiest and most profitable way to keep your business competitive and at the cutting edge of emerging payment trends. To find out more, reach out to a member of our team today.
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- Generate New Revenue By adding or expanding payment offerings to your solution, you can start earning higher monthly and transaction-based recurring revenue.
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