Build a more resilient eCommerce strategy

One of the key criteria for a resilient and agile business is the strength of a company’s eCommerce strategy. Many mid-sized businesses are still in the early stages of their eCommerce journeys but understand now is the time to build capacity and move forward.

The ability to offer your customers a range of channels through which to interact, and to offer a smooth and easy online experience, is critical. An important component of this is the payment experience. Research shows that 44% of UK consumers will abandon a purchase if their preferred payment methods are not available, and 58% state they would stop a purchase altogether if the checkout process is complicated.

At Barclaycard Business, we’ve launched our payment gateway, Smartpay Fuse, that can support your eCommerce approach in a number of key ways. It easily integrates with your website and provides a secure, reliable and smooth payments service that improves the experience for the customer. It has sophisticated inbuilt security and anti-fraud tools, and it even provides you with customised data reports, meaning that you can better analyse and understand customer purchase patterns – helping drive more sales.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Are your systems able to cope with spikes in volume? Do queues form between your shopping cart and payments pages at busier times?

Can you accept many of the alternative payment methods that are growing in popularity? These include mobile payments (such as Apple Pay and others), instalments on finance through providers such as Klarna, or international alternatives outside the traditional Visa/Mastercard payment rails

Are you confident that your systems are truly robust from a fraud and security perspective?

Do you have the capability to recognise, accumulate and analyse customer trends and buying patterns?

A clear eCommerce strategy is even more important in the new business climate.
 

Mid-sized businesses sometimes face resource challenges that prevent them from really optimising their eCommerce offerings. But taking the time to do so is almost certain to bring benefits to business performance and growth, as ever more customers are shifting to online and mobile.

Accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, we saw customers buying remotely en masse, and this wasn’t only for ‘essential’ items. Our research found that UK consumers spent £40.6bn on dispensable items during lockdown to lift their spirits¹, with demand for in-home experiences (or ‘insperiences’) and subscription services rocketing.

Our quarterly SME Barometer found that mid-sized and smaller businesses exceeded their revenue expectations for Q2 in 2020 and were predicting revenue growth of 14% over the next 12 months². Mid-sized businesses (with turnovers of £10m-£25m) were most confident, recording the highest positivity index score across a range of factors.

Making sure that your business has the eCommerce strategy and payment gateway capabilities in place to build on these encouraging signals will be critical to future success.

¹ £40.6bn calculated as total average spend (£771.34) x adult population (52,673,000) = £40,628,756,546.73. Population figures taken from Office for National Statistics Mid-Year estimates, June 2020.

² Barclaycard SME Barometer YouGov research, August 2020.