Note to Retail: Keep Shopping Simple if You Want Consumers to Buy

Simplicity in the omnichannel shopping experience is a concept that’s seen and appreciated by consumers. But as anyone familiar with the infrastructure behind the experience will tell you, it’s not so simple.

From the point of view of Bob Legters, senior vice president of product at Paysafe, merchants need to deal with any potential friction, and smooth it out, or they risk losing customers who will simply move on to a better experience elsewhere.

“Friction’s like a river that’s constantly coming at you,” he said. 

All stakeholders, he said as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series on “Simplicity: The New KPI,” depend on simplicity to get everything done that they need to get done.

In connecting consumers with businesses across its platforms, Legters said, “There’s a lot of work on the front end” to deliver the best experience possible for individuals. And behind the scenes, too, Paysafe is itself always evolving, anticipating the changes and challenges to the merchant processing space that can come as state regulations change in the U.S. tied to taxes and other reporting complexities.

From his vantage point at Paysafe, which is a global payments platform, regulations can be a source of friction if not managed properly. The know your customer (KYC) and enhanced due diligence (EDD) required on transactions done cross-border means that  “consumers just don’t stick around for the extra clicks and the extra requirements that are there. We have to remove that friction. The merchants pay us to handle the complex so that they can feel like things are simple.”

Paysafe does so, he said, by leveraging partnerships to engage the customers in a “one bite at a time” fashion, to keep them informed about what’s going on with transactions, and why additional frictions may be introduced during a transaction. In the meantime, he said, the ultimate goal of commerce done via device is to let as many “good” transactions get through.

Paysafe, which he said is outcomes-focused rather than metrics-focused, “wants a good transaction that we know the merchant is happy with, but we also want one that we know that consumer’s happy with, even though we may not have a relationship with that consumer at all. We may completely be behind the scenes. We have to make sure we’re engaged enough with our merchant to know that the consumer’s happy.”

To get that maximum benefit, as merchants see increased conversion rates (and revenues) and customers remain loyal, advanced data and analytics, Legters said, can identify individuals based on devices, frequency of logins and other salient data points. Partner firms, he said, help fulfill KYC and know your business (KYB) and underwriting activities. 

The availability of digital channels, Legters said, ensures that, through in-app messaging and texts and SMS, Paysafe can help “manage the consumer to make sure that we identify and engage with them when there’s a transaction that may be posing a risk — and this prevents a decline.” Freezing accounts can be sidestepped with real-time communication.

“This avoids the ‘big friction,’” he said, “of turning down a good consumer,” adding that if a consumer’s transaction is turned down, “at least they feel like they were a part of the process and they understood it. I’ve seen people walk away from the terminal and say, ‘Oh, yep, I forgot to turn my card back on.’ … Getting the consumer to participate can sometimes smooth over friction that might actually cause disruption.”

The data and the transaction outcomes, of course, help inform fraud modeling, which in turn helps make subsequent transaction flows better. As he told PYMNTS, “KYC means more than just validating who they are. It means understanding their transaction patterns and being able to process for them regularly and approve their transactions.” Measuring success, then — and with simplicity as a key performance indicator — comes down to measuring the dependability inherent in recurrent transactions.

Asked by PYMNTS about Paysafe’s roadmap, Legters pointed the twin goals of self-service and self-support transparency as consumers and merchants onboard — ideally within minutes, so that commerce can get going as quickly as possible. 

“The simpler we make it,” Legters said, “with a ‘one-click’ version of things, the simpler it’s going to be for people to repeat their [buying] behavior.”

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