Consumers Want Payment Options That Help Manage Spending

As consumers look for simpler and more intuitive eCommerce experiences, Harvest Hosts sees providing more payment options as key to meeting shoppers’ demand to be able to control how they manage their spending.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Neel Mehta, head of product for the company, which provides RV camping memberships, spoke to how the brand leverages its consumer-facing tech stack, made up of solutions from Chargebee with other capabilities layered on top, to meet this demand.

“A lot of our signups come through mobile, and people just want to click. The day we turned on Apple Pay on the site, 12-15% of our signups switched to Apple Pay. … People are not afraid of subscriptions, but they want more control,” Mehta said. “…With PayPal or Apple Pay, you can go into your wallet and cancel subscriptions. We offer the exact same functionality on our site, but people have so many subscriptions that they want it to be easier to be in control.”

In fact, roughly half of all consumers use digital wallets, according to the February PYMNTS Intelligence report “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Can New Use Cases Drive Consumer Use of Digital Wallets?” a collaboration with AWS. Plus, consumers who use digital wallets spend more. The study found that, for travel services such as Harvest Hosts provides, digital wallet users spent $351 on their most recent such purchase, 22% greater than non-users’ $287.

Plus, payment choice can be key to shopper loyalty. For the study “The Online Features Driving Consumers to Shop With Brands, Retailers or Marketplaces,” created in collaboration with Adobe, PYMNTS Intelligence surveyed more than 3,500 U.S. consumers in October to understand their choices and behaviors when they make purchases online. The results revealed that 34% of shoppers consider the availability of their preferred payment method when deciding where to shop.

Moreover, PYMNTS Intelligence data from 2022 revealed that 50% of consumers see the ability to use their preferred payment method as important when shopping with online retailers.

Mehta added that trust also factors into consumers’ demand for digital wallet payments, noting that Harvest Hosts’ customers skew older, and these members might trust established digital payment providers such as PayPal and Apple Pay more than “just putting [their] card into the site.”

Indeed, trust is essential for online shoppers. The same PYMNTS Intelligence and Adobe study revealed that three-quarters of consumers consider trust to be a pivotal factor in their choice of eCommerce merchant. Plus, the 2022 PYMNTS Intelligence study revealed that 41% of online retail customers would be very or extremely likely to switch merchants if they lost trust.

Looking ahead, Harvest Hosts is looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the member experience and drive loyalty.

“Something that we’re working towards is, if someone tells us that they are planning a trip from point A to point B, we could just fully automate that process using AI, based on what other people have done with our product,” Mehta said. “We could take a lot of that planning out of the RV-er’s hands and start to use our AI investments to make it easier for them.”

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