Roger Niederer, chief market officer merchant services at payments and transactional service provider Worldline, exclusively discusses the best methods for retail merchants in gaining the most benefit from Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
Customers are coming and they will be coming fast!
The ever increasing retail popularity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday mean that they now established firmly as the ultimate shopping events of the year.
These key days mean that retailers can expect their sales to increase massively; Cyber Monday being the biggest shopping event in retail calendar and Amazon saw sales increase by “millions” during the Black Friday period last year.
This means that customers expect retailers to have bigger and better deals across everything from tech to beauty and fashion to sporting goods.
But how do retailers make sure they can benefit from these key events?
As well as having the right products at the right price, it is equally important to make their customer’s shopping experience as easy and as smooth as possible.
The key success in a very crowded space is to offer the best mix of payment methods and seamlessly combine online and offline sales.
However, managing both physical shop and online is not quite an easy and straightforward as one can imagine. Both channels are crucial and the race is on to deliver the best retail customer experience as possible.
By using the skills and knowledge of a payment service provider that is capable of enabling a fully integrated Omni-channel experience, retailers can rest assured that they remain in tune with their modern, demanding and evolving customer base. Here is our advice for retailers of the future:
- See your physical store as an asset, not a burden. Use it to give consumers a truly unique experience and don’t forget the ‘personal touch’ as physical stores present a unique face to face opportunity to up-sell and to be considered a destination rather than merely a channel.
- Use technology to your advantage; providing touchscreen terminals in store can allow people to browse with a customer service representative and choose or customise their product.
- Be prepared for any occasion and plan ahead for retail surge e.g. Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Make sure you have a payment services provider that can give you the 24/7 support you need. And don’t forget to have a back-up option in place for customers if a problem does occur.
- For online sales, ensure your website has the appropriate level of capacity to cope with a surge in sales and have contingency plans in place in case online traffic exceeds your capacity.
