The pandemic has transformed consumer expectations for their e-commerce shopping experiences. With Main Street reopening its doors and consumers craving physical interactions after 18 months of isolation, e-commerce businesses now face new challenges that must be overcome. More specifically, they need to provide a local touch to the specific markets that they serve.

To learn more about how e-commerce businesses can thrive in the new world by approaching payments with a local touch, PaymentsJournal sat down with Bradley Riss, CCO at Checkout.com, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Services at Mercator Advisory Group.

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Insufficient payment options cost merchants

Merchants that fail to provide consumers with the payment options they prefer are leaving money on the table. In fact, 43% of e-commerce merchants lost revenue in 2020 because they could not offer local payment methods in countries where they saw a surge in demand.

This data point highlights how important it is for e-commerce merchants to be able to cater to the payment preferences of customers that engage with their brand online. For brands serving customers in multiple markets, these preferences may vary widely. For example, while Mastercard and Visa cards are go-to payment options in the United States, they are not issued directly in China; Alipay and WeChat Pay are table stakes offerings in China, but not widely used in the United States.

“The mantra of international business—go global, think local—I think that applies more for the payments industry than really any other. You can go from France to Germany across the border, and there’s radically different consumer behavior and payment preferences,” explained Riss.

A little research into consumer payment preferences can go a long way. “It’s quite easy to say if you’re in a certain market [there is] baseline research you should be doing to help people pay and you should be offering those [preferred] payment methods to them,” Riss added.

Knowing consumer payment preferences across different markets allows merchants to provide a sophisticated yet local touch to their payment offerings. “You have to have a high level of sophistication too as you offer those payment options in markets outside your home market, not just how the consumer wants to pay, but leading that and recognizing the IP address and presenting different ...