Retail’s Digital Tipping Point: Payments Plus Rewards With a Lot More Mobile

Before the pandemic pushed us all to live life electronically, going shopping was an active pursuit.

Consumers browsed, budgeted, planned, and even dressed up to go to the mall for decades. Now, as the 2020s are half over, eCommerce has changed things. Retailing has evolved from in-person to online channels and happens across some combination of the two.

Jenn Barkley, vice president of Acceptance Solutions Commercial Marketing at Visa, told PYMNTS in an interview that consumers are in a “passive state of shopping,” at least most of the time.

The conversation centered on the 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index Report, the fifth annual survey commissioned by Visa and produced by PYMNTS Intelligence that cuts across 22,000 consumers and merchants. The GDSI found that merchants must engage customers with a “unified commerce” approach, offering seamless mobile-first payments experiences across online and in-store settings.

For merchants, “there’s an elusive quest to conquer omnichannel — and it’s really hard,” Barkley said.

Many merchants are struggling to meet consumers where they want to be and are playing catch-up, procuring point solutions and attempting to integrate those new technologies. The balancing act can be tricky because offering too many payment methods — or placing friction in the mix — can turn consumers off.

“We’re at this turning point for retail,” Barkley said, adding that merchants are “no longer just competing with [other retailers] … you’re competing for individuals’ attention spans and whatever is going on in the room with them.”

Merchants who prove successful will shift how they treat the customer relationship to win consumers’ undivided attention, she said.

The joint Visa/PYMNTS Intelligence data indicated that the unified commerce approach is sorely needed, as 6 in 10 merchants said they lack the technology to meet the demands of mobile-first shoppers, and companies without digital assistance found that their sales slipped 7%.

For Visa, a unified commerce mindset means building off what Barkley termed an “infrastructure-first approach to payments acceptance — where you have a strong but flexible foundation that can be customized.”

Through a single point of integration and APIs, companies can help ensure that consumers can “channel hop” as they use mobile devices to buy online, in the aisles, or buy online to pick up in store, she said.

“You’re able to channel switch and not break the experience for the end consumer over the course of time,” she said.

For the organization, there’s the benefit of tapping into a single platform for all the payments data and insights that come with the single point of access.

As retailers revisit their payments strategies in the mobile-first age, preferred payment methods and rewards top the list of features that turn would-be buyers into paying customers, cited by a respective 75% and 65% of consumers surveyed.

“Those stats support the importance of re-evaluating what the future of the customer relationship means,” Barkley said.

Offering a preferred payment method is the equivalent of having effective communication in place, as merchants anticipate and meet customers’ needs (with newer methods such as buy now, pay later) with a unified checkout experience that straddles card-present and card-not-present situations, she said.

Loyalty and rewards programs shape mutual benefits, where customers feel that businesses “know” them and companies drive additional revenues and repeat purchases, she said. All of it is done through tokenization and Visa’s open-source acceptance platform that improves anti-fraud efforts.

“This model allows businesses to become operationally efficient in a way that frees them up to go and be innovative,” she said.

Part of that innovation lies in revamping stores, which are becoming de facto distribution centers or aisles where digital browsing takes place in some cases.

Regardless of the commercial setting, Barkley told PYMNTS, “there’s an incredible opportunity for creativity, for differentiation,” as merchants fashion “new revenue streams and new opportunities for collaboration with Visa as all these building blocks come together.”

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