What is online retail merchant services?

November 20, 2024
3 min read

Online retail merchant services cover a vast industry, which incorporates several means of processing online payments electronically. These can include:

  • Payment processing via mobile devices (such as Apple Pay)
  • ECommerce and online payments
  • Abandoned cart recovery solutions such as split payments and buy now pay later
  • Fraud detection and prevention tools
  • International payments
  • Dispute and refund management

This list is not exhaustive, due to the ever-expanding nature of the retail merchant services industry. This industry has been met with significant innovation in recent years, with pioneering merchant service providers emerging due to this PayTtech boom.

The impact of this will be significant for the retail businesses who adopt them, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition and offer a better customer experience than ever before.

What are the benefits of investing in leading online retail merchant services?

Better customer experiences and more customer loyalty

If your payment experience is disjointed, this makes retail businesses significantly less competitive.

If an online transaction fails, potentially due to insufficient funds or credit limits, then this often leaves a frustrated customer. This is evident in a LexisNexis survey, where 60% of organisations reported losing customers due to failed payments.

By ensuring you make the payment process as streamlined as possible, your customers will favour your process over competitors who haven’t invested in more advanced retail merchant services. A positive payment experience will contribute to your overall customer loyalty and give you an edge over your competition.

A healthier bottom-line

With failed payments, there are often detrimental costs to businesses - for both B2C and B2B. Failed payments cost the global economy $118.5 billion per year and can have a negative impact on the bottom-line of eCommerce businesses. When you have failed payment recovery methods and multiple ways to pay in place, you provide your customers the flexibility to facilitate more successful payments. Multiple ways to pay are essential to remain competitive and meet customer expectations, as a SagePay survey reported that 90% of UK customers think businesses should offer a wide choice of payment methods.

Additionally, if your payment process is streamlined and your customer takes less time to complete their purchase, this allows for far less time for them to reconsider their purchase, due to the convenient experience created for the customer!

What is a merchant service provider for online retail?

These are businesses who provide services for those in search of online payments solutions for ecommerce. These services improve your successful transaction rates and reduce abandoned cart rates. Here are some of the best merchant services for online payments:

Hands In- Group Payments and Multi Card

Hands In’s split payments allow merchants to offer the ability to split payments as a group or between multiple cards natively within checkout or as a cart recovery measure at the point of a decline. This reduces failed payments due to insufficient funds or credit limits, as well as allowing more payment options and increased flexibility for customers.

Retail Merchant Services- Integrated Payments

Integrated payments connect Point of Sale (POS) systems, online payments, and card payments. All payment data collected by these individual systems is collated together and returned to the cloud.

This reduces human error, increases the speed at which customers can be served and disputes settled, and enriches reporting with accurate customer data.

Elavon- Pay by link

If you want to facilitate online payments, but don’t have a website that allows this, then link payments. You can send these links via email or SMS and they take your customers directly to your payment page. Therefore, providing a convenient experience for your customers and boosting their engagement.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive list of merchant service providers, whose services include fraud prevention and digital wallets, check out our blog on the most innovative merchant service providers here.

However, if you’re in search of a merchant service provider that offers the best merchant services to reduce abandoned cart and facilitate more successful transactions, look no further than Hands In.

Get in touch to find out more about our pricing and the transformational effect that Multi Card and Group Payments can have on your bottom-line.

November 20, 2024
3 min read