Payment Trends and Challenges for Peak Shopping Season 2024
Prepare Your Business for Peak Shopping Season 2024
The holidays are just around the corner, meaning now’s the time to start considering your business’s strategy for peak shopping season. Our new guide, The Merchant’s Guide to Peak Shopping Season, dives into current market research on each of the core seasonal shopping events:
Just Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone can have a tremendous impact on your yearly revenue. In a survey of 8,000 consumers, nearly three-fourths plan to spend between €226 to €2263 on Black Friday alone. On Cyber Monday, spending in the UK is expected to top €46.884 billion this year.
These high spending numbers make it all the more critical for merchants to assess their approach to payments and ensure their customers’ needs are met.
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Key Insights into Payment Challenges Facing Merchants During the Holidays
As holiday shopping heats up, payment volumes surge, putting the resilience of your payment system to the test. Shoppers may experience an increased sense of urgency and scarcity to make their last-minute purchases or to get the best deals, leading to higher customer churn if there are any delays or disruptions in the payment and checkout process.
Some of the key challenges covered in this guide include:
False Declines, Chargebacks, and Fraud
While fraud prevention is critical, excessive measures can lead to false declines, driving customers away. Yet, inadequate prevention can lead to instances of fraud and chargebacks, creating an equally unpleasant scenario. A reliable fraud system should balance security with a seamless customer experience, reducing chargebacks while keeping legitimate transactions flowing.
High Payment Volumes
With holiday spending forecast predicting a rise of up to 3.3% over last year, preparing your payment infrastructure for increased volume is a necessity. Outdated legacy systems may struggle with increased loads, risking outages. Meanwhile, highly scalable and cloud-native platforms can adjust to fluctuating demand, ensuring smooth transactions during peak times.
Increased Demand for Flexible Payment Methods
Today’s shoppers have unique payment preferences. Increasing your payment flexibility by offering more payment methods can help you attract more customers to your business during peak season. Research reveals that digital wallets have soared in popularity across Europe, accounting for $10 trillion in total consumer spending in both Europe and the U.S. Local payments have also become more important to offer, accounting for 77% of online purchases in 2021.
Core Technologies to Implement
Improving your payment system so that it is optimised for the influx of transactions during the holidays requires the adoption of several key technologies, such as:
- Key technology
Cloud-native platforms and applications
- Key technology
Diverse payment method connections
- Key technology
API integrations, plugins, and customisation tools
- Key technology
Performance analytics
- Key technology
Fraud detection and prevention tools
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By unlocking access to The Merchant’s Guide to Peak Shopping Season, you’ll gain our insider takes and research on all the key holiday season shopping events, as well as an in-depth exploration of the payment challenges and solutions to consider.
