The pandemic has forced businesses to adapt to consumers, and the result is that many businesses have been looking into how to add new payment capabilities quickly with minimal impact.
Businesses want to delight their customers, but they must also consider the impact changing systems would have on their internal infrastructure.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer expectations for seamless and innovative shopping experiences put pressure on businesses.
Payment solutions are no longer one-size-fits-all
Trend toward flexible platforms
In Gartner’s recent survey that looked at trends in digital commerce adoption, a key finding addressed a shift from the classic “build versus buy” to “build and buy.” The majority of survey respondents, 51 percent, bought at least part of their digital commerce platform, while also extending or customizing it. This contrasts to the 30 percent who solely built and 19 percent who solely bought a standalone platform.1
Businesses continue to push for more flexibility as new capabilities may or may not be readily available in a purely built or bought payment solution. This tells us that it’s not a one-size fits all anymore. In today’s fast-paced commerce environment, the maturity of technologies differs by vertical, region, and payment service provider–requiring a build-and-buy approach that balances revenue optimization with re-platforming costs.
While there are similarities in the needs, expectations and constraints, we’ve discovered that your business is unique in its architecture and your world grown more diverse and complicated every day as you design experiences for your customers.
Considering your expanded digital commerce platform options
It’s still a struggle to add new digital commerce features, thanks to the swirling, constantly shifting mix of new payment types, emerging channels, expansion into new markets, and changing consumer behaviors. And in this environment, the typical complex and cobbled together patchwork of siloed payment systems and technologies simply won’t cut it.
Having a modular platform makes it easy for you to enable innovative digital commerce experiences when you need. Off-the-shelf capabilities, such as digital wallets, pay-over-time and other alternative payments, allow you to enable new methods quickly. Also, having a platform with an ecosystem of integrated solution providers provides additional innovative options at your fingertips.
Why use a build-and-buy approach
With a single, simple view of your entire payment world, you can get a streamlined, efficient way to manage it all and keep costs in check. And if you’re not tied to a payment provider, you’re able to negotiate better terms with your banks and partners.
With a build-and-buy approach for your digital commerce platform, you can get a single, simple view of your entire payment world. And you can also get a streamlined, efficient way to manage it all and keep costs in check. Since you’re not tied to a payment provider, you’re able to negotiate better terms with your banks and partners.
What to look for in a payment platform
To help you stay ahead of the curve, look for a payment orchestration platform. What does this mean?
A payment orchestration platform can bring together all your existing services through a single integration point that helps you control how to route your transactions. It can also provide a more complete approach to complement and extend your commerce environment without replacing it.
For more than 25 years, we’ve been at the forefront of digital commerce with $546 billion in global processing volume2 and we’ve continued to enable a robust suite of capabilities in a modular framework. With the security & scalability of Visa, we’ve worked with more than 450,000 businesses3 to help them extend their reach around the world. Our modular, cloud-based platform enables you to do business with anyone, through any channel, using any payment type, with any acquirer—so payments fit for you and your customers.
Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
1 Gartner, 9 Key Trends in Digital Commerce Adoption, 9/23/20
2 Cybersource & Authorize.net total payment volume for calendar year 2019
3 Cybersource & Authorize.net global customers as of August 2020.