As part of pre-holiday planning, successful retailers look back at previous peak periods to determine their upcoming needs. Some items to review include general capacity and trends during peak shopping days like Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In addition to an increase in volume generally, it’s important for retailers to also be prepared for intense spikes of volume. In order to be prepared for these dramatic spikes and dips, it’s essential for merchants to work internally with their technology and operations departments to make sure they’re operationally ready to support the high volume of transactions anticipated during the season. Besides working with your internal teams, we recommend collaborating with your payment gateway provider to share your expectations and anticipated peak selling times on your apps, websites and stores.
Fei Zhao, Director of Specialist Sales at Mastercard has first-hand knowledge of how essential the collaboration between a retailer and their payment gateway team can be during peak season.
“The gateway’s flexibility and reliability are the best reflection of a well-designed infrastructure. Our gateway has been put to the test to support global top merchants’ peak sales campaigns. Our experience, teamwork with our partners and proven record is the testimonial and reassurance for the merchant’s peace of mind in the complex and fragmented payment process.”
Peak season can bring to light numerous risks for retail merchants. In recent years, large brands were not immune to data breaches and fraud concerns, and it’s anticipated the majority of consumers are still concerned about their financial and personal data being compromised during the upcoming shopping season5.
While it is important to ensure consumers feel secure in shopping on your site, app or in-store, the holiday shopping season is also a time you need to make sure your fraud software is not blocking otherwise legitimate transactions. False positive e-commerce fraud is a common retailer concern especially during peak shopping. A recent Experian study showed 69% of businesses are concerned with the number of incorrectly declined customer transactions. Not only do false positive declines result in lost revenue – there is also a potential loss of new customers and a negative brand impact on existing customers6.
As your business is getting ready for the shopping season, make sure your enterprise fraud management tools are set up in sync with your holiday campaigns so you don’t miss out on legitimate sales.
As you begin to plan your holiday season campaign, a key ingredient in the success of your business is a merchant payment gateway provider you trust. Can your provider answer these three questions? Are you ready to help me capture more sales with a comprehensive payments mix? Will you be able to handle spikes in volume that come with sales and peak days? Are you taking the right steps to ensure consumers will feel safe shopping with you?
In the end, it comes down to teamwork. You’ve done all the planning to be ready for the holidays. Now is the time to make sure your payment provider will be there to support you when your plan becomes a reality.