How Can Mobile Payments Benefit Your Business?

Where’s your phone right now? On the table next to you? Your pocket? Your purse? Chances are it’s within reach because a modern phone isn’t just a device to make calls; it’s an important accessory to your life. It’s therefore unsurprising that mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. In 2018, over a third of global internet users reported making a mobile payment within the last month. And this number is only increasing.

As the name suggests, mobile payments refer to monetary payment for products or services through portable electronic devices, like cell phones or tablets. Mobile payments are often carried out via apps, which are connected to your bank accounts or cards. So how can this technology benefit your business?

Whether you run a small business or a large corporation, you want customers to have a seamless experience. If you sell a product or service which doesn’t require customers to visit a physical location, they can make mobile payments at the place and time most convenient to them. However, mobile payments can also improve customers’ in-store experience by speeding up the check-out process. There’s no more searching for cash or punching in a pin and waiting for receipts. Customers pull out their phone, authenticate the transaction, and leave.

You don’t need to use mobile payments to establish loyalty programmes. However, a mobile payment app makes loyalty programmes much easier to execute. You won’t need to swipe a card or—even worse—stamp a piece of paper to ensure shoppers get loyalty points. Customer information can be stored in the payment app; so they will see themselves accumulating loyalty points in real time. According to Retail Dive, loyalty points incentive customers to return: an impressive 60% of shoppers would like to pay for products in store, using loyalty points that are accessible via their smartphones.

We all know the security risks associated with walking around with wads of cash. Now only do mobile payments eliminate these risks, in many instances, mobile wallets are more secure than card transactions since the likelihood of fraud is reduced. For example, Apple Pay uses tokenization to encrypt customers’ data; this means that sensitive information, such as a credit card number, is replaced with a token. A token looks exactly like a credit card number, but it’s not the original, making it worthless if it were stolen by criminals. Furthermore, there is no known algorithm for using the token to discover the real credit card number.

When customers make mobile payments, you can automatically collect data about their shopping habits. You can use this data to improve customer service; for example, you can enable push notifications to target customers who usually shop on the weekend or customers who usually buy a particular product.

Mobile payments are not the technology of the future. They’re the technology of the present. Customers are clamouring for more convenience; why not consider whether your business can use mobile payments to better meet their needs?