Owners of an online business have a lot of big decisions to make when it comes to online payments.
You can always give away control and enjoy the passive boost of a digital wallet. But to maximize profits, owners should consider taking control of their own digital wallet.
1. Easier
By default, a digital wallet is meant to make the payment experience easier for the business and the consumer. If you build digital wallet, the same thing applies! The biggest misconception about building is that it will be difficult. And once you get past the build stage, maintenance becomes a pain. This wasn’t true back in the day, and it definitely doesn’t hold up for modern standards.
As one of the most widely used financial products in the world, a digital wallet will always have tons of support. Problems that are considered unique will usually have a help article with multiple ways to resolve the issue. This is an important part of making the experience easier for business owners with their own digital wallet.
By building a digital wallet, you also gain the ability to optimize features that make sense for your business. That means no useless bells and whistles, and less clutter for a customer to deal with. How well you tailor a digital wallet to your business will impact sales. Even if the first iteration is all over the place, the second and third will be better than the last.
2. The Omnichannel Experience
Omnichannel is defined as a multichannel approach to sales that boosts a complete shopping experience for a single brand. In a brick-and-mortar setting can go omni by blending their digital and physical inventory system. Wal-Mart does this by providing easy access to their physical inventory online. Users can pay for everything online and have the product shipped to their front door on the same day.
For online businesses, their omnichannel ecommerce experience will always include access to a digital wallet. Since this is all about unification, it makes sense that building your own digital wallet would work better than outsourcing to another website. Cohesion matters when hooking in a consumer to complete the sale. Your website offers full control over personalizing the shopping experience from start to finish. If you hand over that control before a sale is made, then it is breaking the omnichannel experience.
A lot of businesses succeed in the beginning of the experience, but run out of gas near the end. If you’re looking at sales metrics (and you should!) then everything should flow. When you see a trend of sales falling off right before the purchase, then that is a warning sign. Build your own wallet as part of the omnichannel approach, and maintain control of the sale rather than giving it away.
3. Loyalty
You can’t put a price on loyalty, but you can definitely simplify it. Digital wallets revolutionized customer loyalty by taking away the extra steps needed to make a purchase. One click shopping became a thing, and it has been the best thing to ever happen for sales.
With a payment method always attached to a wallet, your metrics will make more sense. Customers with repeated purchases will have more developed patterns to follow. If you want to hit them up with targeted sales, it won’t be random spam. Instead, you’ll be more likely to gain their interest and an additional sale.
Upsells before checking out are also part of the loyalty that comes with your own digital wallet. When you outsource a digital wallet, an upsell can easily destroy an entire sale. An upsell is meant to enhance a sale rather than fade the interest of the buyer. The two main things that impact an upsell are recommending the wrong products and not adhering to an omnichannel experience. Losing a single sale is one thing, but losing multiple will show a lack of loyalty. If your payment process is affecting a consumer’s loyalty, then it is time to build your own digital wallet and take control.
4. Compatibility
Compatibility is important for any business that wants to maximize their profits and customer loyalty. The compatibility balancing act is something that business owners have struggled with for years. Different technologies across different platforms made the shopping experience the wild west for customers. That led to the same product or service providing a completely different shopping session for multiple customers.
When mobile apps were created, it created compatibility through unification. The biggest part of that change? Digital wallets that synced to both mobile and desktop platforms. That means adding things to a cart on a website and then signing into the mobile app to continue shopping. Compatibility is an important part of not disrupting a person that wants to spend their hard-earned money.
When you build your own digital wallet, you substantially grow ways to provide individual awards and achievements. Any type of promotion, point system or customer appreciation system works side by side with your brand. Compatibility should always be a focus when you’re building your customer base. Not many businesses get a second or third chance to make things right, so make the first one count!
5. Control of Beacons
Beacons are used in marketing and advertising as a wireless way to interact with consumers. As a proximity marketing channel, this technology has two faces – smart marketing, and straight up spam. Here are the differences between the two, and why your own digital wallet can make a difference.
Beacons can be defined as spam when they constantly engage with incompatible customers. These beacons are more interested in the numbers game. When it is particularly bad, a user can’t tell the difference between normal spam and beacon spam on their phone. The result of spam beacons is that the consumer will block current and future marketing by your company. It adds a tarnish to your brand image, and makes your company look toxic.
Beacons that focus on targeted marketing work better when you have your own digital wallet. That means only customers that are interested will be targeted, and their interest is rewarded by a modern checkout system. After a beacon finds a compatible customer, you can have a completed sale in less than a few minutes. Over 570 million devices are compatible with beacons, and that number is still growing.
6. One Less Thing to Think About
There is a certain ‘high’ that everyone gets when they find a product or service they want to purchase. This natural high comes from an interest based on specific wants or needs. A good example is lamenting about how your lawnmower is starting to get old and then running across a newer model. That is why new features are always highlighted when a new product comes out. This draws attention to why you need it, and why it should be purchased now.
But then the next question is price and affordability. How often have you been on a buying high only to get knocked back down to reality when looking at the price? Businesses overcome this by giving different buying options to the consumer. They can also recommend a similar model at a lesser price, or a lower tier service.
Answering questions before they are asked makes marketing powerful. A customer on a buying high will make it all the way to the finish line without a second thought – if their questions are answered, and if there are no roadblocks to finishing the purchase. Do you know the most common roadblock to a customer on a purchasing high? A clunky digital wallet or online purchasing system.
7. Speed
A speedy purchase makes both consumers and business owners happy. Time is money, and you don’t want to waste it. When a third-party digital wallet goes down, it is outside of your control. When a wallet you’ve built malfunctions, it is 100% within your control. Optimizations and code are all within your reach when a digital wallet is built. It leads to lesser downtimes, and a much better understanding of how to deal with crisis situations. A business that is familiar with its own checkout tools will always be faster at correcting mistakes, or avoiding them altogether.
8. Familiarity
When digital wallets were first introduced, security was a major concern. Not the lack of it, but just a general weariness associated with online purchases. Nowadays, major concerns are attached to the actual brands that process payments rather than digital wallets themselves. You’ll find people that hate PayPal but love Payoneer. The same can be said of the Apple Pay versus Google Pay discussion. Your business can avoid the negative discussions around a digital wallet by creating one that is specifically tied to your brand. That means when a customer checks out, they won’t be greeted with a processor that they may or may not like.
Bring In the Big Bucks
Having your own digital wallet has an incredible number of financial advantages. Your business deserves the best, so processing the payments all on your own website is the smartest option. Mobile wallets are growing, and now is the best time to take advantage of the wave.
Read more:
8 Reasons Why Your Online Business Should Have Its Own Digital Wallet
