How Can Merchants Make the Most Out of Payments Data Analytics?

It is not an overstatement to say that data drives commerce. Merchants worldwide collect information to analyze it and make business decisions based on the gained insights.

The global digital payments market is estimated to reach $204.1 Billion by 2028 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.10%. This means that all merchants, regardless of their primary sales channels, will have plenty of data to tap into, so it’s crucial to know how to harness its power.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how you, as a merchant, can get the best out of large volumes of data and develop an effective strategy to make payment analytics scale your business.

Introduction to Payments Data Collection

At the beginning of the 21st century, when most purchases were made with cash or bank cards, merchants had access to very limited insights from payments data. In fact, they could only see how much money they made and track what the most popular payment methods were.

These days, however, due to the development of FinTech, business owners are dealing with a much more comprehensive range of information. The types of consumer data merchants collect can be divided into four categories:

1. Personal data. This includes personally identifiable information (PII) like the consumer’s name, address, and email, and non-personally identifiable information (non-PII), such as the user’s IP address, web browser cookies, and device IDs.
2. Engagement data. This data represents the way consumers interact with your website, mobile app, social media, text messages, emails, and paid ads.
3. Behavioral data. This type of data is all about transactional details like purchase histories, product usage information like reports on repeated actions, and qualitative data like mouse movement logs.
4. Attitudinal data. This data covers such metrics as consumer satisfaction rate, purchase criteria, product desirability, and beyond.

Experts say that a robust business strategy that will enable you to get a 360º view of the customer shopping experience should involve data collection via:

• Asking customers directly
• Tracking customers indirectly
• Combining other sources of customer data with those of your own

To make it happen, merchants can gather data round-the-clock with the help of different digital consumer touchpoints:

• POS terminals
• eCommerce websites
• Online surveys
• Social media platforms

Together, these touchpoints form an electronic repository of invaluable business data that merchants need to process and visualize to turn into knowledge.

Why Data Analytics Software Is a Critical Tool for Merchants

Capturing large amounts of data leads to the need of sorting and analyzing it. However, even when it comes to a small business, no human is capable of reading through line after line of all the customer data and making conclusions that encompass every critical detail. Computers, however, can sift through this data quickly and efficiently 24/7/365.

Data analytics software helps merchants visualize data, understand it better, and make faster and more accurate business decisions. Some programs will even offer recommendations to decision-makers based on the contextualized data.

Unique Business Needs Require Custom Solutions

Each business’s scaling goals and future targets are different. While one merchant may want to grow internationally through social media channels, another one might wish to stay local and target a very specific client niche.

That’s why, while it’s critical to have the right package of analytical tools, preferably as a part of an omnichannel commerce platform, there’s more to visualizing data efficiently.

Besides, if you run a large-scale business, bear in mind that various departments will benefit from different insights. For example, payment data will be the most valuable to your operations team to understand the following:

• Which payment methods and acquirers are used more frequently
• Which errors occur repeatedly
• How to optimize payment systems effectively

The marketing team, on the other hand, will need to focus more on consumer insights to find out such aspects as:

• Which demographics buy which items
• Which stores of the chain are more profitable
• Which advertising campaigns are more successful
• How to improve the conversion rates

Such an approach will help you analyze historical data and detect past trends to identify potential opportunities and forecast consumer behavior in the future with maximum efficiency.

How Can Payneteasy Help?

There are plenty of free and paid analytics tools available nowadays. However, keeping track of different unsynchronized data sources can be tedious and confusing. At Payneteasy, we’ve embedded analytical software into our payment tools to offer you the best way to receive valuable business insights.

For instance, our Fintegrate cashier system collects consolidated data from different PSPs into one management interface to offer you:

• Automatically generated reports & statements
• Accurate profit reporting
• Insights on decline reasons

Similarly, our white label payment gateway provides you with useful information regarding:

• Consumer behavior
• Financial sustainability
• Your main KPIs
• Business trends and forecasts
• Employee activity

With Payneteasy, your back office and reports are customizable, enabling you to visualize payments data conveniently. Reach out to us now for any additional information!