Data, or the New Gold Rush

Any company that is seeking to improve and provide the best solutions to their customers must take an interest in business data. Data has been playing an extremely important role in all fields because it allows companies to better understand the habits of their consumers and to adapt the products and business strategy to better respond to certain issues.

Whether it is to improve the performance of a website, to measure customer satisfaction or to optimize a solution by analyzing the user experience, data analysis is essential. With it, the company makes decisions based on facts and not assumptions. Without it, decisions are randomly made and the likelihood of making wrong ones is very high.

Being a specialist in payment, we are fully aware that using data would help us provide our customers with smooth and useful solutions and adapt them to optimize their sales. Since our customers are from very diversified fields, each business case is very different and they all need specific targeted approaches.

Examples of use cases analyzed using payment data

Covid crisis and the impact on global sales :

Understanding our data better allows us to have deeper knowledge into the field. In the image below, you can see for example the general trend of the sales for one of our customers in France for 2020 and 2021, two years highly impacted by the health crisis.

Based on this, we decided to measure the following and takes important actions accordingly :

• The impact of the different important events like lockdowns on the business. Everyone knows it lowered the sales drastically, and globally, but being able to measure it allowed us to take concrete strategies. Indeed, with this information, we were able to quickly implement the increase of the contactless payment limit from 30€ to 50€.
• The general trends (and seasonality) of the sales and understand the sources that impact (or not) the sales. In this example, we can see that apart from the Christmas period where sales reach a strong peak, there are no other really significant events in the year like Black Friday, where we could expect an increase in sales but this is not really the case. In this case, we made sure we provide a back-up solution -using the payment orchestration in e-commerce- to avoid any traffic disruption during this period.

But since our main focus is the payment, the features we follow the most are obviously oriented on this field. In the example below, we can see the evolution of the use of the contactless method in stores. Many people actually were curious about the impact of the pandemic on the payment by contactless type (this and also the fact that the upper threshold increased from 30€ to 50€).

As presented above, the increase in the contactless payment limit had a significant impact and we have seen a significant increase in the use of this method. But this increase was not as big as expected and stabilized around 40% from the end of 2020.

Measurement of the performance of payment methods

Our business can mainly be divided in two fields: In-store and Online. In a world where everything becomes more and more digitized, online payment becomes more and more important. Indeed, we also follow our online KPIs with attention. For example, we can study at: if we suggest Paypal as a payment method, will it be used?

In the example on the left, we compare the use of PayPal with the card payment. And we see that although PayPal is used more than 1 out of 3 times, the payment by card is still the preferred payment method for consumers. With this information, we can make decisions about other solutions or in terms of UI/UX.

Analysis of failed transactions

Analyzing failed transactions — and the root cause for failure — is another way to monitor transactions and improve the global performance.

Some transactions are rightfully rejected (because the risk score associated is too high and are automatically blocked by the fraud module), but others are rejections that could be avoided and could end up in a sale. By analyzing this type of data, we can better analyze the origin of technical errors and correct them, or better understand the origin of fraud techniques and find solutions to counter this. This would help increase the merchant’s revenue and conversion rate.

We could provide you with countless more examples of how to analyze data and draw conclusions to make decisions.

Data is …the new gold!

Analyzing data for payment, either to better understand the behavior of the end customers or to improve the performance (thus the revenue) of payment methods and customer journey, is becoming more than important… It’s vital !

At Market Pay, we have been using data to embetter our products, to help our merchants better understand their end-customers and make them fully aware of the decisions made. We believe that experience only is not enough anymore…Data is the new wand to support our merchants in their decisions, choices, and since we’re processing billions…we need to get the maximum of this new gold !