As e-commerce and digital payments become stronger day-by-day in India, brick-and-mortar businesses are bound to adopt the ways of online selling. The corollary to this theory is also true – a large number of digital-first brands are exploring offline channels to boost sales and gain customers.
This has led to the growth of online to offline (O2O) startups in India and around the world. The reason is quite simple: Customers nowadays are finding brands online as well as offline. As a rule, companies will have to be present everywhere customers go. This kind of approach is more popularly known as an omnichannel strategy.
What is Omnichannel Retail? When a company starts showing up with its products, offers, and customer support system, on different platforms like online marketplaces, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn), physical stores including small-sized pop-up stores, etc, it’s called omnichannel retail. |
But as you get into this omnichannel mode, how do you optimise your payment methods that suit this strategy?
If you are also looking to expand your business strategy to omnichannel, this article will be useful for you as we provide actionable insights on how to simplify payments.
Why Should Startups Focus on Omnichannel?
If you run a startup that is looking to expand its presence from online to offline or vice-versa, you should consider integrating omnichannel strategy into your business.
On the face of it, it’s pretty straightforward: be present on all fronts where customers are likely to shop from, discover your products, or talk about ideas related to your offerings. For example: if you run a packaged fresh juice company, it makes sense to place your products at events like marathons, corporate meet-ups, residential complexes, etc.
While executing omnichannel strategies, you should ensure that the customer experience of consuming or using your products should not vary irrespective of the platform.
Interesting Read: Omnichannel Strategy: What Does It Mean For Your Business?
Omnichannel retail is important for O2O brands because, if done right, this is one of the few ways that can fuel the remarkable growth of your startup in a very short span of time.
In addition to the growth in revenue, your O2O brand will also start seeing changes on the following fronts:
- A better understanding of the customer journey
- Quick resolution of customer complaints
- Positive customer feedback
- Increase in repeat customers
- Fewer churn in customers
- Ability to reach new segments of customers
While you implement omnichannel strategies, one big challenge you might face is handling digital payments. Online to offline startups specifically face challenges with digital payments as they will have to have payment tools that can work efficiently on both platforms.
If you are looking for a platform-agnostic payment solution that can help you with your omnichannel strategy, Paytm for Business is your friend. While there are ample tools that Paytm for Business can help you with, you should not miss out on these four:
Four Payment Tools Every O2O Startup Must Use
These three payment tools from the kitty of Paytm for Business will be a game changer for your O2O business as it embarks on the omnichannel strategy:
- Paytm Payment Gateway
If you run an offline business and want to sell your products and services through a digital channel, you need a payment gateway to accept money online.
Paytm Payment Gateway is a well-known payment platform that has an impeccable track record of fast payments and a 99.99% success rate.
With Paytm Payment Gateway, you get to offer your customers all the payment methods including net banking, debit and credit cards, UPI, digital wallets, and Paytm Postpaid.
Interesting Read: Paytm PG Brings Cutting Edge Digital Payments Tech For SMEs
You can personalise your checkout page as you like with diverse customisation options based on your brand colours and design elements. Paytm Payment Gateway also allows your customers to safely save their cards so that they don’t have to enter details every time they shop from your website. This is comfort, coupled with security.
- Paytm Smart Devices
As a new O2O brand, if you are exploring sales through physical retail stores along with successfully running your online business, you require Paytm Card Machine, the all-in-One POS solution.
Don’t look beyond Paytm Card Machines meant for physical retail outlets.
Paytm Card Machine allows customers to pay via any payment method including debit and credit cards, UPI, digital wallets, net banking, and EMIs. It can even accept international debit and credit cards.
The POS machines are built for all types of retail businesses. You can create invoices, track payments, and manage large-scale events as part of your omnichannel strategy.
In addition to POS devices, you should consider using Paytm All-in-One QR code solution that makes digital payment really easy for customers. They simply have to scan the QR code, which is universal for any app, and make the payment.
Paytm Soundbox is another revolutionary smart device from Paytm’s kitty. It is a palm-sized device that announces every time a customer transfers money. This solves a very unique problem that businesses with a large number of customers face – the problem of tracking every transaction.
- Payment analytics
Irrespective of the platform your business is present on, you would require to understand and analyse your customers’ buying and payment patterns.
Paytm Payment Analytics is a powerful tool that gives you deeply researched reports on your customers’ payment preferences, comparative analysis of monthly sales, data on payment failures, etc.
Interesting Read: Access Insights on your Payments Data with Payment Analytics
You can even pinpoint your research and find out details such as which payment source contributes the highest to your sales, and customer retention trend with month-on-month analysis, among many other such reports.
As an O2O startup, such a deep analysis will be quite helpful in shaping your omnichannel strategy.
- Paytm Payment Links
Offline businesses that want to sell online without having to build a website, should use Paytm Payment Links. It is one of the most versatile ways to collect money digitally. Offline to online companies can send Paytm Payment Link to their customers via email or message. Customers can simply click on the link and pay using any payment option including credit and debit cards, net banking, UPI, and Paytm Postpaid.
While creating Paytm Payment Links you can add payment details, which can act as invoices or bills to share. Paytm Payment Link also allows you to send subscription links so that you start collecting money automatically from your customers.
Conclusion
Paytm for Business is a one-stop solution for your brand. As a part of your omnichannel sales strategy, you can’t afford to ignore customers’ payment experience.
Since digital payments have become a norm for both online and offline shopping, you must work with a payment company that has the best tools for both. Paytm for Business is clearly the right choice for O2O startups.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question 1: What are the unique features of Paytm Payment Gateway?
Answer: Paytm Payment Gateway has a long list of features that will help your business grow. A few features include:
- Quick refunds: You can process refunds and returns for your customers in minutes using Paytm Payment Gateway. Irrespective of whether you are an online or offline company, or have both sales channels, refunds on Paytm PG is easy for both you and your customers.
- Checkout with saved cards: If you are facing cart abandonment issues, you should enable saved card shopping feature for your customers. But you can only do that if you can tokenise customers’ card details. Paytm PG will ensure that your customers’ cards are safely tokenised so that they don’t have to type their card numbers and other details every time they shop from your website. Allowing customers to pay via their saved cards is one of the few advanced digital payment tools that small and medium businesses get to access with Paytm Payment Gateway.
- International payments: Reaching global customers have never been as simple as it now with Paytm Payment Gateway. You can accept money from customers around the world in their currency without any glitch. Paytm Payment Gateway is equipped with processing money from 100+ currencies as well as enabled real-time currency conversion.
Question 2: What are the other features of Paytm Payment Links?
Answer: Paytm Payment Links can be used to collect money from your customers even if you don’t have a website. You simply have to create and share the Paytm Payment Links with your customers and they can pay it by clicking on the link.
You can use Paytm Payment Links in different ways:
- You can add custom amount in the Paytm Payment Links for every customer as per their purchases
- You can send Paytm Payment Links to a large number of customers at once
- You can use Paytm Payment Links as a payment reminder
- Paytm Payment Links can be used for recurring payments as well
- You can accept partial payments also from Paytm Payment Links
- You can even process refunds
