The core issue of sending your customer out to a third-party payment experience is that you’re also bleeding out all of that customer knowledge.
Willie Pang is CEO & Managing Director at Limepay, a brand-first financial payments platform designed with innovative payment technologies, such as white-label checkout, and empowering brands to build more loyal customer relationships.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, Pang shares his insights on the future of digital payments, B2B funds, and so-called “checkout spaghetti.”
Pay It Forward (1:27)
The explosion of choices has meant it’s become increasingly complex for the customer at the end of that path-to-purchase funnel. There’s a revolution of some sort in the B2B marketplace where B2B commerce is also on the rise.
The sharp increase in digital payments like digital currencies and crypto will only continue to grow in use and popularity. In fact, digital payments account for close to 42% of online transactions globally. For its part, Limepay “acknowledges that one size does not fit all when it comes to financial solutions,” says Pang.
More than half of businesses today report increasing their online interactions with both customers and clients. In addition, 35% report expanding their use of digital payments over traditional payments. Despite the wide array of digital payments from credit cards to Apple Pay, however, cheques still accounted for 42% of all B2B transactions in 2019.
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with cheques,” Pang says. “It’s just that it’s slow and sometimes expensive. There’s an opportunity to unlock a bigger business benefit or optimize and take the data that they can get out of that payments ecosystem for use in their day-to-day business.”
A recent article in Forbes noted that Covid-19 rapidly accelerated the pace of digital transformation, including digital payments. In fact, according to a study conducted by the research firm PYMNTS, 82% of SMBs say they are changing how they process and receive B2B payments in response to the pandemic.
What’s in Your (Digital) Wallet? (3:49)
You spend all this time building experiences on the front-end to capture customers, to tell them about products, to help them come and buy your things. Then they get to checkout and all of that is like another world. These two things have been incredibly disconnected.
In 2019, the second most used form of payments were credit cards, making up 40% of point of sale payments. In 2020, digital wallet payments—including the transfer of value from one digital wallet to another—accounted for 41.8% of online transactions worldwide.
Additional research, such as a recent FIS PACE study, supports the rapid growth of digital payments: 32% of mobile wallet users actually have three or more wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, on their smartphones.
In integrating the shopping experience with the checkout process, you can provide a more seamless transaction for the consumer from start to finish.
Check it Out (5:18)
As you get to the end of the checkout, there are sometimes five, six, seven, 10 different brands. There’s Visa and MasterCard, there’s Affirm and Klarnar and Apple Pay and Google Pay. We affectionately call this the checkout spaghetti.
The front end of the customer experience has traditionally been the focus of marketers despite the importance of the back end and checkout process. The buying process itself should be frictionless.
For example, one of Limepay’s clients is online retailer Sportitude, which offers authentic performance sports gear from all leading sports brands. The retailer was looking for a new “Buy Now, Pay Later” provider to help with their checkout process without redirecting the customer to a third-party website. Also important? Minimizing cart abandonment.
Limepay offered a single solution that would stop inadvertently sending the customer to a third-party website. This has made the entire checkout experience seamless. The result of this solution was a 23% increase in shopping cart size as well as reduced chargeback rates.
“Consumers actually don’t care about the payment brand, whether it’s PayPal or your bank or whatever,” Pang says. “At the end of that experience, what they want to do is click a button and get what they want to pay for.”
Naturally it’s also important to optimize your e-commerce site for mobile checkouts by incorporating popular digital payments such as PayPal, Venmo, and Apple Pay.
I’m With the Brand (7:33)
The data you can get from spend behavior—propensity to purchase, frequency of purchase—those insights and the ability to aggregate that information and put it back into the hands of brands has got to be the number one opportunity.
Limepay builds relationships between brand and customer while improving the payment lifecycle, making it flexible, seamless and more personalized. Ensuring that the brand is first and foremost in the customer’s mind throughout the shopping experience is key to increasing audience loyalty.
In the end, Pang says, “Consistency of effort wins the game.”
To learn more about Limepay, visit their website and follow them on LinkedIn and Facebook. To stay up to date with Willie Pang, follow him on LinkedIn.
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