Leverage Payment Data with Real-Time Updates and Holistic Visibility

In today’s business landscape, payment data is more than just a record of your customers’ transactions. Merchants need to leverage the insights to fuel their decision-making and strategies to improve the payment experience. We explore the importance of having real-time data at your fingertips and holistic visibility over transactions.

The role of modern technology and payment providers

The rise of digital payment methods and mobile wallets has drastically increased the availability and complexity of payment data and the scope of analytics. In 2021, almost half of the total eCommerce transactions around the world were conducted via mobile wallets. Therefore, digital wallet providers have access to huge quantities of payment data that can be shared with the merchants. 

As the digital payments ecosystem continues to grow and the level of analytics sophistication improves, this presents a big opportunity for merchants to leverage its potential. So, if you’re not taking advantage of this data to grow your business, now is the time.

Why companies need to effectively track and analyse payment data

For businesses across all industries, including high-risk merchants and sectors, tracking and analysing payment data can significantly improve compliance and decision-making.

Properly leveraging payment data can help your business reduce the cost of acceptance, streamline the consumer journey, monitor chargebacks and diagnose underlying operating challenges. Let’s dive into these benefits in more detail below.

Reducing the cost of acceptance

There are costs associated with all online transactions, but merchants don’t always understand the real cost of accepting payments for their goods and services. The underlying cost of a transaction may be affected by various factors, such as the fees charged by the payment service provider, fees passed down by credit or debit card companies, or the overall transaction mix. 

Effectively analysing your payment data helps you detect and eliminate unnecessary costs within this process, improving your company’s bottom line.

Streamlining the consumer journey

Top payment service providers (PSPs) use tokenization to map consumer journeys and behaviours through key moments in their relationship with your company or brand – starting from the awareness stage up until conversion. 

Visionary leaders across various industries are using this data to streamline the consumer journey, reducing cart abandonment and improving customer loyalty and satisfaction.  

The more consumer behaviour data you have at each stage of the customer journey, the better you can anticipate (and resolve) problems that lead to purchases not being made.

Monitoring chargebacks

High-quality payment data and real-time updates allow you to track product returns and chargebacks over a given period. This minimises the risk of fraudulent chargebacks and helps you better analyse return trends, so you can prevent future chargebacks by taking the necessary steps to improve customer satisfaction. 

Having easy access to and visibility over payment data will help you determine which products are driving the most chargebacks and why. Then you can fix inaccurate product descriptions, better communicate your return policies and improve other areas causing customer dissatisfaction. 

For more insights into managing chargebacks, download our Merchant’s Guide to Chargeback Management.

Identifying and addressing operating challenges

Operating challenges like EMV chip read fails and bank routing errors cost businesses money in lost sales and abandoned carts. Merchants need to access and analyse payment data to diagnose issues and their causes, address the challenges and find appropriate solutions. 

What kind of payment data insights do merchants need from their gateway system?

The best payment service providers can provide merchants with a wealth of information regarding customer behaviour and shopping patterns. This helps merchants make important purchasing and merchandising decisions so that they can grow their business and improve customer satisfaction. Here we outline four of the most important payment data metrics to track and monitor

1. Payment types and methods

Do your customers prefer to pay by card or e-wallet? Are they more inclined to buy subscriptions or make one-time payments for goods and services? These payment data insights can help you better understand (and cater to) your customers’ needs, habits and preferences. 

2. Transaction amounts and values 

How much are your customers spending on the different categories of products or services that you offer? Which of your offerings are the most popular and generate the most revenue? On which days of the week do you make the most sales? 

With these insights, high-quality payment data can help you refine your business model and increase your bottom line. 

3. Transaction volumes and velocity

Tracking the volume and velocity of transactions can help you determine how much your customers are spending per transaction, and how many transactions take place on a typical day or week. 

This information enables you to set measurable marketing and sales goals. You can also use this data to compare your business performance with competitors and decide whether to focus on acquiring new customers or nurturing and upselling your existing customer base.

4. Chargeback rates

PSPs that allow you to monitor your chargeback rates can help you increase your profits by reducing unnecessary chargeback costs. This will also help you enhance customer satisfaction by minimising or eliminating the factors that frequently lead to chargebacks.

The benefits of real-time payment data updates

Being able to view transaction activity in real-time can help you troubleshoot common problems like data line outages, transaction timeouts occurring within internal network components and network availability issues. 

Here are some of the major benefits of real-time payment data updates: 

• Helping you understand where to best invest your time, money and resources to quickly resolve costly operational issues that negatively impact your bottom line. 

• Having constant access to your transaction data and payments network at any point in the business cycle, allowing you to grow sales by making timely adjustments and modifications to your business plan as you gain new information. 

• Enabling Operations and IT teams to collaboratively research and troubleshoot problems, with access to a common dashboard with visual representations of transaction data.

• Having the ability to identify transaction bottlenecks as they occur and resolve them quickly before they turn into bigger issues. 

Real-time payment data updates provide you with the necessary information and insights to increase efficiency across your payment processing infrastructure.

How Fibonatix’s payment gateway offers merchants holistic visibility of transactions to power decision-making

Fibonatix is a leading global payment service provider that provides merchants of all types with advanced payment gateway solutions and a sophisticated data and reporting system. 

Gain holistic visibility over your customer transactions, access to real-time payment data updates and macro analysis to make better business decisions and anticipate your customers’ needs and pain points. 

Fibonatix’s user-friendly and flexible data system enables you to generate any required payment reports in suitable formats to support your needs. You can adapt the system to your organisational processes to enhance data visibility and control.

Summary

You can see the importance of leveraging the wealth of payment data and analytics available to merchants. With the right visibility, control and reporting capabilities, your transaction data can help you to deliver a frictionless payment process and fuel your growth.If you’re looking for a payment gateway that can match your goals and ambitions, with the functionality to meet your business requirements, get our handy Checklist for Choosing the Right Payment Gateway Provider. It outlines the key considerations and questions to ask prospective providers. Check it out!