[WATCH NOW] How to drive growth with seamless omnichannel payments

• At the recent event, "How Enterprise Merchants Can Leverage Seamless Omnichannel Payments to Drive Growth," experts shared insights on how to maximize customer conversions.
• Friction-free payments are central to building trust and driving customer loyalty.
• Customer payment identities remove effort from the checkout process, leading to more sales.
• Watch now and find out how to embed a seamless omnichannel experience into your customer engagement strategy. 

In the era of online ordering, same-day pick-up, and free shipping and returns, customers have high expectations of the merchants they buy from. Many retailers offer one digital shopping experience, and another in-person shopping experience. But that siloed model is no longer effective for today's customers. Instead, successful merchants must adopt an omnichannel experience that connects the dots between in-person and online shopping. 

According to Julie Fergerson, CEO, cofounder, and director emeritus of the Merchant Risk Council, growing customer expectations around speed and convenience have contributed to the mass adoption of omnichannel commerce.

"Today's customers really are expecting that seamless, personalized omnichannel experience, and merchants really need to understand the customer journey across the channels," she said at a recent virtual event sponsored by PayPal. 

Fergerson pointed out that although omnichannel payments have been around for 10-to-15 years, they're now a necessity for merchants. Customers depend on the flexibility of omnichannel payments, and rather than feel excited when those features are available, they now feel frustrated when they're not.

This need for better omnichannel options is beginning to become a merchant priority. Fergerson highlights some findings from the National Retail Federation's State of Retail report: Half of retailers offer or plan to offer ship-from-store capabilities, while two-thirds offer or plan to offer buy-online and pick-up in-store features.  

Omnichannel payments are vital to merchant growth

Omnichannel can only deliver a seamless customer experience with a strong payment infrastructure behind it. Providing friction-free and channel-independent ways to pay makes it easier for customers to commit to a purchase. 

It's something that Cindy Turner, vice president and general manager of PayPal Braintree, thinks about a lot. 

"Our goal is always to deliver a toolset to our merchants that allows them to provide consistency to their consumers," she said. "This technology goes beyond the shopping cart, with an emphasis on providing the end-to-end tools that merchants need." 

She added that these platforms and tools allow merchants to reverse or refund a transaction — regardless of which channel it came from. 

And merchants are increasingly seeing the value of technology that enables omnichannel payments. Adam Kronengold is the chief digital officer of Authentic Brands, the parent company of a number of popular fashion retailers, from Vince Camuto to Eddie Bauer. 

"From a digital perspective, our job is to connect the dots across the various businesses through e-commerce and omnichannel optimization, enterprise technology partnerships, customer data, and centralized marketing," he said at the event. 

He added that unification and integration in the payment stack are key to growing customer trust and revenue. 

"The big opportunity for us is unifying key elements of [our] technology stacks and building highways to connect those businesses in ways that benefit the consumer," Kronengold said.

Friction-free payment experiences build trust in omnichannel solutions

Customers want the ability to select a product, pay for it, and receive goods in a way that's fast, simple, and convenient.  

"Omnichannel experience is really about consistency," Kronengold said. "That's the big word — consistency — regardless of where the customer is shopping, whether that means enabling seamless transactions in store, online, or even through emerging channels like social commerce, our goal is to remove friction across the board."

But how can brands actually put that consistent approach into action? Turner said the tools and technologies behind the checkout have the power to make or break a customer's experience. 

"You want to connect [a customer] to a payment method, which helps to reduce friction the next time that consumer shops and they're logged into an app or website," Turner explained. That means facilitating the storage of their credentials into a single vault. 

"You can attain that transaction and credential first in person, then carry it over into other channels," she added.

Friction-free journeys are built on predictability. A predictable approach directly builds customer loyalty which drives up omnichannel revenue and reduces the cost of acquisition. That means meeting customer expectations and using their transaction history as a critical source of information. 

Understanding a customer's shopping habits by looking at their transactions is one way to drive growth through cross-promotion and upselling opportunities. 

For example, say a customer "is buying sportswear in a store, but you also know that the same customer is a common purchaser of kids' clothes," Turner said. "You can start to push them parallel products that you know they're also interested in."

Ultimately, making payments frictionless helps merchants maximize their conversion at every point. "Every sale that gets [a customer] to the cart, it's a single click to get to checkout," Turner added.

Payment-ready identities personalize the omnichannel experience

Understanding a customer's payment preferences ahead of time improves their experience and likelihood to convert. Turner and her colleagues at PayPal define this as a "payment-ready identity." In other words, technology brings together several important pieces of digital information about a customer, including geolocation, whether they're a returning customer, their preferred payment methods, and payment behaviors across other sites and apps. 

This allows Braintree to pair a customer's identity with their payment credentials, so that their credit card, digital wallet, or other payment methods are automatically included at the point of sale.

"In an in-store environment, imagine if you can just show up and the merchant already knows who you are and your preferred way to pay, so you can just check out," Turner said. She and her team are in the process of implementing a "just walkout" program with one of PayPal's merchants. 

"You'll have an event ticket, so we can associate a payment method with that and be able to close the sale as that consumer walks around a stadium," she explained.

There's more to discover about omnichannel growth

Merchants can no longer afford to silo their in-store and online operations. Today's customers want a seamless omnichannel experience, and if your business can't offer that, they'll find one that can. 

The full panel discussion covered many other aspects of omnichannel growth and payments, including customer conversion, controlling fraud, authorization optimization, and more. 

Watch the video below to learn how adopting omnichannel payments can help your business drive greater growth.

Advertisement Feature: This article is sponsored by PayPal, and its content has been created in collaboration with Insider Studios.