How to Find the Ideal Omnichannel Payments Provider

An intensive transition from the traditional to e-business that has been happening over the past few years has intensified the efforts of businesses to operate and engage consumers on multiple channels. 

Even online sales themselves have changed profoundly. A rather straightforward and most frequently used model where a user browses from their desktop and waits for the delivery guy still exists, but it’s just not the only one anymore. 

New consumer habits require new corresponding back-end processes. Especially if you are running an e-commerce business, you will undoubtedly want to find the best omnichannel payments provider who will professionally enable sales transactions at every possible touchpoint. 

New Sales Channels Require the Best Omnichannel Payments Provider

Buyers order online, pick up the merchandise in a store, use their mobile devices looking for the best deal available, add and remove stuff to and from the cart, use self-service ordering solutions, self-checkout kiosks, etc. 

They have become demanding and that is their right in the hyper-competitive world of sales. There is even a special name for them – they are called the ‘one-click’ generation of consumers.

Photo by PhotoMIX Company: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-using-black-and-white-smartphone-and-holding-blue-card-230544/ 

If you are setting up or overhauling an e-commerce store, your search for the ideal payment provider should be high on your checklist. If your e-store is already up and running, you can always re-evaluate the current situation and try to find a vendor that can deliver more and help you boost sales. 

Bear in mind that the payment options to be used on your platform should be as diverse as you can afford. 

Cash might have been the king in the physical world of yesterday, but people today rely on a variety of payment solutions, ranging from bank cards to Bitcoin, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. 

Sales on a Custom WordPress Website

The chances are high that your website with the store will run on WordPress CMS. To be a successful one, it will have to be customized to a certain – most probably high – extent. 

Custom WordPress website development costs vary. Generally, you pay a sum depending on certain criteria:

• Location of the website
• The geographical location of the development team
• Site’s complexity 
• Additional optimization for mobile platforms. 

But, when calculating the overall WordPress website development price, the matter of omnichannel payments has to be prioritized. 

The site development team you hire has to coordinate with the payments solutions provider from the beginning. That will minimize the risk of something going wrong in the most sensitive area of closing sales on your e-store.  

Development costs can appear challenging, but the framework that is put correctly will save you from the headache of subsequent patching and tinkering. 

Choosing the Right Omnichannel Payment Provider – What to Look For?

Omnichannel Capabilities

Your payment provider partner has to be able to process payments on any channel, from in-store, card-present payments, and self-checkout to card-not-present payments, including online, in-app, and mobile. 

However, the pure technical ability to handle all those types of payment is not enough. An omnichannel payments provider has to deliver such a solution that would offer a consistent user experience using different payment methods. 

Employing different systems for different types of payments may formally allow merchants to accept payments on various channels, but it misses the feature of a seamless user experience. 

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-smartphone-and-credit-cards-in-a-miniature-shopping-cart-6214475/ 

If your customer discovers that the interface for paying by bank card is significantly different from the one that handles app-based payments, for example, they might end up being very confused. And a confused customer easily becomes a non-customer. 

Therefore, what you need is a partner with a functionally and empirically consistent platform that provides all of the functionality your clients need. 

Proven Adaptability

What works well today may become obsolete or insufficient tomorrow. The ideal omnichannel payments provider is the one who has a proven track record of successful evolution. 

App-based payments, international bank transfers (ACH, SEPA, SWIFT/BIC), QR code payments, cross-platform tokens, text-to-pay, etc. are some of the payment methods gaining traction. 

Depending on the nature of your business and its geographical reach, you may not need all of them at the moment, but a provider should be able to provide you both with the current scope of offer and a roadmap about features in development. 

Hardware-Agnostic Provider

What you should look for is a hardware-agnostic payments partner, meaning they do not require any special hardware adaptations and can work with different types of systems without suffering compatibility issues. 

Security

Your potential partner’s solution must be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)-certified and support EMV payments.

The additional security measures that you should ask for are end-to-end encryption, point-to-point encryption (P2PE) encryption and tokenization to keep payment data safe and keep your clients in compliance with PCI.

Billing and Invoicing

As sales cannot be complete without billing and invoicing, you should also look for billing and invoicing ISV. 

Image by Sabine van Erp https://pixabay.com/photos/receipt-money-groceries-currencies-1274307/ 

Poor billing solutions may cause serious problems – unclear invoices, errors, and even delayed payments. Also, the inaccuracies that have consequences on your business can metastatize into a tax or other legal problems with the authorities. 

System billing software has to be on your checklist, too. Same as with a payment solution provider, a billing software vendor has to be highly adaptable to a constant inflow of changes required by the needs of the business and by legal provisions. 

For the purpose of a wide variety of legal and official correspondence that originates from your core business, there are tools that efficiently handle them (electronic signature, for example).

Final Takeaway

Choosing the Right Omnichannel Payment Provider is crucial to your sales. Although the people will keep coming to your retail store (if you have them, of course), the business is rapidly moving toward the internet. 

Empowering the customers to select the purchase option freely is one of the keys to success. Being superficial or skipping your due diligence on this matter may cause grave consequences to the very existence of your business. 

Photo by Angela Roma: https://www.pexels.com/photo/excited-young-female-leaning-on-shopping-bags-and-smiling-happily-7319127/