Creating your E-commerce Payment Strategy
With the late boom of e-commerce caused by COVID and the general trend where that businesses started prioritizing digital channels having a strong e-commerce platform has become a must for any business that wants to survive nowadays. It doesn’t matter if you are big or small, chances are that this aspect alone can define if your business crumbles or thrives. This is something that few people would argue. But, even with this being common knowledge, there are still some key aspects for e-commerce channels that are known to a small groups of people within organizations (or none at all) and work as “black boxes” where as long as it is working no one gets near it. Payments is one of these aspects. Whether it is because of the high complexity of the subject, lack of resource and time, or the lack of vision, for some reason most companies fail to see how important can a strong payment strategy be for an organization to achieve it’s goals. It is true that there has been a late boom of fintech startups and big companies (specially big tech) that have entered this industry and have solved some of the biggest problems in this area, but this is only prove of the point that as many companies lack the knowledge to handle payments correctly, the few that do can do very profitable in selling their solutions to others. A clear case of this is that MercadoPagos (Mercadolibre’s Payment Service Provider) in 2020 became 50% of the parent’s company value. But, there are still so many companies that could benefit from understanding a bit more about this world so that they could offer better experience to their customers, solve operative issues, optimize their costs or even tap into new lines of business where they have strong competitive advantages that they don’t even know they have. This applies specially to more traditional large companies that tend to focus on their main source of income. Some examples of how to pinpoint the type of companies that would benefit from taking a closer look into the payment industry would be the ones with big user bases (insurance companies for example), closed ecosystems or that are highly vertically integrated (example), that have large volumes of sales or sell in many geographies (like airlines, marketplaces and big retailers) companies that have large distribution networks (Gas Station networks and convenience stores) to name some.
So, whether it is just by understanding a big more of how things work under the hood, helping someone create a payment strategy for their business that can allow them to reduce costs or get their conversion up, or even helping them detect a new business opportunity for their company; this series of articles are intended to help people understand a bit more about the Payment industry and the many opportunities that it can provide.
The series would focus on three main chapters where the first group of articles would look to explain in a high level how the industry works from a Merchant’s perspective. The second one would give a guide on how to set up a payment strategy as a merchant looking to be as agnostic to an industry as possible. The third would look to describe some cases of companies in LATAM that saw opportunities in the payment industry and took them with great rewards.
Industry Context (WIP):
- Payment vs Fulfilment
- Players in the payment Industry
- Main Payment operations
- Paying with Installments
- Fraud overview
- Payment Authentication and EMVCO
- Settlements
- PCI from a Merchant’s perspective
- DCC
- Industry Information sources
Creating your Payment Strategy (WIP):
- ¿Do I need to give much though to my Payment Strategy?
- Creating a Payment Strategy
- Implementing a Payment Strategy
