October 17th, 2013 by Elma Jane
You find a good deal online, and as you hastily proceed through the checkout, something goes wrong.
After typing in your name, address and credit card number, you mis-key a digit of your credit card number. The transaction doesn’t go through. The screen seems to yell at you. START OVER. You feel like yelling back.
You have to get to a meeting, so you close your browser and vow to revisit the process later or – worse – try booking the flight on another travel site.
Cart abandonment is a well-known problem for merchants trying to sell goods to online shoppers, and it is even more pronounced when the shopper is using a mobile device.
Travelocity was seeing far too much of it, so the online travel booking site turned to Jumio for a solution.
Travelocity’s deployment of Netswipe, Jumio’s credit card scanning and validation tool, provided the basis for discussion in a recent webinar, “How Travelocity Increased Conversion, Engagement on its Mobile Apps,” sponsored by Jumio and hosted by Mobile Payments Today.
The best webinars look at use cases, said Anthony Lanham, Jumio senior vice president for North American sales, and Travelocity’s experience with Netswipe provides a great example.
Travelocity’s problem was straightforward, the online travel agency’s director of engineering. The site is a common destination for people looking for just-in-time bookings, he said. They need it right now.
And with shoppers increasingly accessing the site from mobile devices, there was this pattern. The user doing a last-minute booking is in a hurry. When you’re in a hurry with a small screen, there’s a decent tendency to ‘fat-finger’ and make key-entry errors. The transaction fails, and that becomes frustrating for the user in a hurry.
A Jumio consumer mobile insight study found that a majority of respondents find it too difficult to fill out forms from a mobile device. And if a purchase doesn’t go through, they almost never go back to try again.
They may come back and finish later, but if it’s Travelocity, the door is now open to go to Expedia and book that flight or hotel.”
Netswipe is designed to remove the burden of entering card details. The solution lets users snap a photo of their card with the camera on their mobile device and present it at checkout, removing the need to self-enter.
In the case of Travelocity, when users reach the mobile site’s checkout page, they see an “autoscan with camera” option in the billing header. They hold the card in front of the camera, which scans it and provides the necessary details to the site. The process takes about five seconds.
To test the solution, Travelocity first implemented it on its sister site, LastMinute.com. Adding the software development kit to the LastMinute.com app was simple and early adoption was larger than the company anticipated. That early success led to quick integration of the app on the flagship Travelocity site.
Checkout conversion rates there also increased much more quickly than anticipated. Over two months, customers using the card scan feature converted at 52 percent, compared to 9 percent for other customers. “The data made it clear that ease of entering payment information was the main reason.”
Though Travelocity’s challenge centered on customer conversion and engagement, Netswipe also acts as a fraud deterrent.
Fraudsters always take the path of least resistance and any decent fraudster can get their hands on the name and number and expiration date that match. But once you get to the point of asking that fraudster to put a bona fide card in front of a camera, you are going to instantly cut out a huge swath of fraudsters. For them to take that information and actually translate it on a physical card that would pass muster for the checks that we do is an enormous task. They can go monetize those fraudulent credentials elsewhere easily.
Moharil offered a few lessons from the integration. First, he said, it’s important to measure, and to continue measuring often. For example, are users checking out the feature out of curiosity or are they using it to complete transactions? And it’s important to plan for backward compatibility – making sure earlier versions of the Jumio SDK and Travelocity app don’t have glitches.
Moharil advised rolling out a new solution along the simplest path, in a small use case, early results for Travelocity have been so good, he only wishes the solution were implemented sooner.
The webinar concluded with a short question-and-answer session. The free webinar is now available for Online Replay, and will remain on the Mobile Payments Today site for 12 months.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, e-commerce & m-commerce, Travel Agency Agents, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: autoscan with camera, billing, booking, cart, checkout, conversion, credit-card, data, device, digit, fraudster, key-entry, merchant, mis-key, mobile, online, shoppers, site, transaction, travel, travel agency's, travelocity, webinar
September 30th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Future of Marketing Lies in Mobile Payments…Why?
Marketing and payments might seem like strange bedfellows to the average retailer, but in fact, they are converging rapidly to bring more value to consumers and merchants alike. Here are 10 reasons why the future of marketing is inextricably linked to payments innovation:
1. Cross-Platform Acceptance
Better yet, these targeted offers can be acquired and redeemed through different mediums…online, offline and mobile…and utilized interchangeably. This makes life easier on the consumer and thus makes them more likely to engage with new loyalty and rewards programs. Moreover, as the Internet and mobile solutions continue to merge, the digital “wallets” that many of us use online today (think PayPal) are, logically, moving to our phones. When these payment and marketing applications are accessible from the same device, customers can seamlessly receive pertinent offers and pay for goods at the same time in the same place. Other apps will give consumers the ability to shop in one medium and buy in another, simplifying omni-channel marketing to affect commerce across all channels. This kind of convenience and value is a win for both customer and merchant.
2. Loyalty and Rewards get Simpler
The reality is that it’s much easier to issue and redeem loyalty rewards, gift cards and discounts when they are integrated into the POS experience and don’t require customers or merchants to alter the existing in-store purchase or checkout stream. You can see these simplified applications already in practice at chains like Starbucks, as well as independent merchants that use systems like LevelUp.
3. Merchant adoption
The payment technologies that succeed will be the ones that are ultimately adopted by merchants, which in turn will lead to consumer usage. Key technologies that will likely facilitate widespread adoption of mobile payments…either proactively because merchants want to see what they can offer them, or passively as they upgrade devices…include:
EMV (chip and pin), which will force merchants to update their POS systems, likely catalyzing them to update all points of interaction.
NFC – Cloud Computing – Geofencing – QR Codes and even Basic Bar Codes
4. More Value for Consumers
And for consumers, the convergence of payments and marketing should deliver highly valuable deals, offers, comparisons information and more, ultimately providing drastic improvement of the buying and shopping experience.
5. More Value for Merchants
So what does this value look like? For merchants, the convergence of payments and marketing should bring in new customers, increase sales from existing customers, and provide more customer data. It should also create a more streamlined multi-channel experience so consumers have little barrier to adoption.
6. No Single Technology will Win
These new technologies introduce an interesting question: What should merchants do to prepare for this brave new world where payments and marketing collide? For one, merchants should avoid betting on any one technology. In fact, the POS needs to morph into something a little more complex, becoming instead a POI, where a broad variety of payment types, loyalty programs, coupons and more can be redeemed. Merchants should be in a position to choose what types of payment they want to accept and in what medium, and not be limited to fixed payment tenders.
When the convergence of marketing and payments will happen
The increasing adoption of mobile payments by merchants and consumers, when combined with new POS environments, will jump-start the convergence of marketing and payments. However, we’re still in the early stages.
Mobile commerce technologies are widespread but still working to gain traction from consumers en masse. Additionally, merchants haven’t yet felt the need to upgrade their POS systems to accept mobile payments
However, the October 2015 EMV Liability Shift, a date set by Visa and MasterCard for certain charge-back liabilities to fall to the merchant unless they have upgraded to EMV-capable POS systems, is likely to push merchants to upgrade their systems.
Once merchants begin to upgrade these POS systems, the smart ones will take the opportunity to add more features and functionality to the systems, including the ability to accept payment…and marketing-driven solutions from mobile handsets. That’s when we’ll see the value of two-way communication between merchants and consumers dramatically change the shopping experience and bring payments into the marketing mix.
7. Smartphone Adoption is Speeding Up
Consumers’ mobile phones are already equipped to deliver highly valuable offers, and adoption is increasing at a rapid pace. Smartphones bring with them new app technologies that include not only mobile payments but also loyalty and rewards programs that are designed to drive preference for stores, good and services.
8. Targeted Offers and Single-Use Applications
Of course, these solutions are still in their infancy. Elegant single-use applications, such as mobile wallets and gift cards, will soon grow to provide highly targeted offers that take into account everything from shopping preferences to location, providing incentives as a customer walks the aisle of a store. Just about every player in the payments ecosystem is thinking about these new commerce technologies. The winners will be those that demonstrate clear value for both the merchants and customers.
9. The “POS” is now a “POI”
A point-of-sale (POS) solution used to be a place where goods were purchased and money traded hands. Usually, this took the form of a cash register or credit card machine. Though these still exist, a wave of new value-added marketing services, such as targeted offers, discounts and highly valuable loyalty applications, have led to the transformation of the POS into a point-of-interaction (POI), a place where consumers and merchants meet to exchange value for value.
10. Two-way communication
When embedded in smartphones, new technologies…like near-field communication (NFC), QR codes, geofencing and cloud authentication solutions…allow for two-way communication between the consumer and the POS solution, enabling merchants to deliver coupons and offers directly to customers’ mobile phones through targeted integrated programs.
Posted in Digital Wallet Privacy, e-commerce & m-commerce, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: bar codes, cloud, device, EMV, handsets, innovation, loyalty, marketing, merchants, mobile, nfc, offline, omni-channel, online, payments, PayPal, phones, POI, point of interaction, POS, qr codes, rewards
