In today’s digital age, consumers have a bias for convenience, speed, and safety when it comes to making payments. As a merchant, this is the trifecta you should aim for.
Moreover, with the proliferation of online-first companies as well as offline to online companies, customers prefer businesses that are available on all platforms.
If you are an online-first company and have ventured into physical retail as well, customers would expect their shopping experience to be identical across platforms. In fact, they would want you to create a synergy between your physical and online businesses including payments.
Consumers’ shopping behaviour is slowly blurring the lines between different channels. Therefore, having an omnichannel payment strategy is very important for your business. In simple terms, what an omnichannel payment strategy means is integrating payments with all business touchpoints.
Advantages of Omnichannel Payment Infrastructure
- Drive more traffic to your store
Merchants can use an omnichannel payment system to get more customers to come to their store instead of shopping from their online store. By offering loyalty points to customers who shop and pay in the store, they can attract customers to step into their store.
- Strong competitive advantage
As a merchant, you must always be looking at ways to stay ahead of your competition. Well, adopting an omnichannel payment system is one way to do it. If you are an offline seller and your competition in the same sector is pretty strong in the online space, you can start selling your products online and accept money digitally.
- More touch points can mean more sales
It’s a no-brainer that if you are prepared to sell your product no matter the platform, you will have more customers sooner or later. Once you create a way to accept money from customers from all platforms, there is no looking back for you.
Imagine, you posted an advertisement on Facebook, and someone showed interest to buy it, and you were able to sell it to them and accept money – all on Facebook!
How to Create a Robust Omnichannel Payment System with Paytm
According to a report by FIS Global, more than 50% of purchases are influenced by information provided by businesses online. The interdependency of different platforms to drive sales is an important trend that every merchant should adopt.
You might already have an omnichannel retail strategy where you allow customers to browse products from your online store in case they aren’t available in the shop. However, you must complement this with an omnichannel payment strategy.
Interesting Read: Omnichannel Strategy: What Does It Mean For Your Business?
Paytm for Business has a dedicated set of tools that will enable merchants like you to offer omnichannel payments to your customers. Since Paytm for Business has an online onboarding process, you will not waste any time integrating our tools with all your platforms.
Here are three premium tools from Paytm that will empower you to build an omnichannel infrastructure:
- Paytm Payment Gateway
If you own an offline retail business and plan to start selling online, you will need to integrate a payment gateway with your online store to start accepting money. This is also important to create the omnichannel payment infrastructure.
Paytm Payment Gateway not only gets you started to accept money online, it offers a gamut of services that lets your brand truly offer omnichannel payment services.
With Paytm Payment Gateway, you can accept money online via all payment modes without any glitch or security issues. Suppose your customer bought something online and came to your store to return the product. You can process the refund for that product online and the customer will receive the money instantly.
In addition to this, Paytm Dashboard gives you complete visibility of where your money is coming from and where it’s going. Basically, you can track each and every transaction to get a quick understanding of money movement. This is quite important when you are building an omnichannel payments infrastructure.
- Offline devices
While creating an omnichannel retail platform, very often merchants overlook the fact that customers would pay in either cash or through digital means. Over the period, it can be quite a problem to reconcile payments.
A big part of creating an omnichannel payment infrastructure is to have clarity on how much sales are happening online, and how much through offline channels in cash or debit and credit cards.
Paytm’s Card Machine is adept at handling payments via debit, credit cards, QR codes, UPI, digital wallets, and Paytm Postpaid.
The POS machine will help merchants in differentiating how much money they accepted in cash and how much was paid in other digital modes.
Paytm Card Machine will also let you offer clients brand discounts as well as special offers from banks. These attractive pricing offers will help you draw customers to your physical retail shop who have been shopping online only.
Other than Paytm Card Machine, you can create an omnichannel payment system with Paytm Soundbox and dynamic QR codes.
While Paytm Soundbox will announce every time a customer pays you money, our dynamic QR code will allow customers to pay by simply scanning them. Customers can scan the dynamic QR codes and pay via any payment method using a payment app.
- Paytm Payment Links
Many businesses that are in the early stage of getting into omnichannel retail are still wondering if it’s for them. For such businesses, Paytm Payment Links is a good tool to get their feet wet.
Paytm Payment Links is a versatile way to accept money from customers digitally. With Paytm Payment Links, you can accept money through debit cards, credit cards, UPI, net banking, and digital wallets.
Interesting Read: What Do Omnichannel Payments Mean For Indian Businesses?
Suppose you are a wholesaler of apparel and you have customers that have been buying from you for the last 15 years. There might be times when they would want to buy products on credit.
Since you want to have an omnichannel payment infrastructure, you don’t want to accept cash. You can send them Paytm Payment Links that will have all the details of the money they owe you, your bank details, and the receipt. Your customer will simply have to click on the payment link and transfer the money to your bank account.
- In-store and web-store payments
Paytm for Business has a gamut of payment options that can be used online as well as in physical stores.
Accepting payments through QR codes has become so common nowadays that if merchants don’t provide QR codes in their stores and on checkout pages, customers might find it weird.
Paytm’s All-in-One QR codes have an added advantage which lets merchants track them and learn how users are interacting with them after scanning the code.
Interesting Read: 0% MDR with QR Codes: Should You Accept This Offer?
All-in-One QR codes have multi-purpose usage as they contain more than one URL. Users can scan an all-in-one QR code, which will give them multiple options to choose from. For example, an all-in-one QR code of a retail chain can ask users to choose whether they want to go to their social media handle or e-commerce store.
Merchants can accept payments from customers using multiple payment options such as Paytm Wallet, RuPay cards, and other UPI apps.
Conclusion
As a merchant, it’s your responsibility to ensure your customers have access to cutting-edge technology so that they can buy products with ease from a platform of their choice without facing any glitches.
You can considerably improve customers’ payment experience by integrating all the touch points including physical retail, online store, social media, and mobile apps. Since payment is an integral part of shopping, you should take extra care of how to sync different platforms from the payment point of view.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question 1: Does Paytm provide merchants with offline devices?
Answer: Yes, Paytm has an array of in-store payment devices that will enable them with omnichannel payments. Offline payment devices from Paytm for Business include All-in-One QR Code device, Paytm SoundBox, and Paytm Card Machine. Merchants can use these to accept money via all payment methods.
Question 2: What is unique about Paytm Card Machine?
Answer: Paytm Card Machine is laced with several features and technological upgrades than what is available in the market. It comes packed with all the billing and payment needs that your business will need. Our card machine has pan-India coverage, partnerships with all banks and brands, and round-the-clock customer support. You can accept money using debit, credit, and pre-paid cards. It can also be used to create EMI payments using Paytm Card Machine.
Paytm Card Machine comes with an inbuilt printer to print out receipts. Since it’s light weight, you can even carry it to different places. This is specifically a very good use-case for businesses who deliver products and have to accept money from customers at their door.
You can choose between three different varieties of POS machines. They are All-in-One POS, Smart POS, and Linux POS.
