POPcodes®, a startup focused on improving consumer, merchant and acquirer experiences, has been selected to showcase their unique solution to over a thousand attendees of the FinTech South conference at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia May 7 & 8, 2018.
The influence of mobile technology on retail in this century has been truly astounding. By 2003, 95 million people around the globe made a payment via their mobile device. By 2015, there were 500 million users making 50 billion transactions for a total volume of 610 billion USD. With mobile wallet growth on the rise, could it be the next subset of mobile commerce to reap the benefits of a mobile hungry populace? Over the last five years, m-commerce has enjoyed a 30% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that is showing little sign of slowing down. If brick and mortar retail is still king, what will it take to bring mobile wallet adoption out of the hands of early adopters and into the hearts and minds of shoppers worldwide?
Keeping customers engaged with your rewards program can be tough. In order to keep them interested, your customers need to be constantly reminded of your program’s benefits. Otherwise, they might forget why they joined the first place, potentially costing you business and having a negative effect on your bottom line.
Around 80% of consumers use mobile phones inside a physical store to check product reviews, according to a recent study by website design firm Outerbox, underlining the advent of the omnichannel shopping era.
Combine this with the growing spending power of the notoriously choosy Millennial generation and it is easy to see why some commentators have branded the concept of customer loyalty as dead.
It is clear from the study that consumers want speed, convenience and timely communication for a better BOPIS experience. Currently, a small portion of total purchases are completed through click and collect, but it is growing in use, with 49% of Americans trying it for the first time in 2016.
Retailers can benefit from creating a winning in-store experience — 59% of buyers expect to purchase additional items at least some of the time. Retailers should explore if they can provide incentives to convert the 41% of customers who are not likely to purchase additional items.
It is interesting to note that 77% of shoppers did not want to be dragged all the way to the back of the store to pick up their items. Businesses should balance their financial motives to upsell patrons entering their stores to pick up their items with the speed and convenience that they expect.
Retailers should focus on creating a winning in-store experience by enabling what matters most to click and collect consumers: speed, convenience and timely communication.
The store of the future will become the most powerful media channel available to a brand, offering customer experiences that are the most profitable product a retailer can sell. But to get there, retail as we know it must die.
In sector after sector, companies are asking how they can adapt to the digital world—how they can build more digital capabilities, create more digital offerings, and even become “digital first” organizations.
But for institutions that have served customers for decades in person and over the phone, digital too often falls short. After the debut of a new app, for example, a jump in sales may not be as big as expected, while hoped-for operational efficiencies—such as a reduction in expensive call-center and in-store customer-support requests—hardly materialize.
Executives naturally wonder why: aren’t customers demanding digital? Without question, they are. But not to the exclusion of other channels, which remain critically important.
According to the study, 60% of retailers consider Amazon at least somewhat of a competitor. These companies also continue to grapple with free shipping, email communications and better access to customer data to mimic what Amazon does best: provide highly personalized and convenient experiences for customers.
Specifically, 63% of retailers believe free shipping for loyalty program members is one of Amazon’s most impactful consumer-facing technology initiatives. Yet, only 10% of retailers have significantly increased investment in technology to better compete with Amazon. Meanwhile, 29% of retailers haven’t even changed their data collection and analysis processes as a result of Amazon’s influence.
That the retail world has changed very quickly and fundamentally in the last several years is no longer up for debate. The digital age has spawned customers that are incredibly knowledgeable about — and always connect to — commerce. The number of potential touchpoints a retailer has with consumers has increased exponentially over the past decade — and the dawn of the era of the connected device is set to expand it even further.
The good news for payments and commerce players is that this evolution has been an excellent catalyst for innovation and improvement — particularly in the pursuit of a better customer experience. The more challenging news is that delivering on that potential is a lot of work and typically requires a series of separate but connected efforts to produce one unified experience.
“Traditional brick-and-mortar merchants are realizing they need both a strong digital and social presence,” POPcodes CEO Gregg Aamoth told PYMNTS in a recent conversation.