The key to success for any business is giving consumers the products and services that they want at a reasonable price. In order to do so, businesses need accurate information about people’s buying habits and behavior.Â
But there’s a catch. Not only is it extremely expensive to purchase data on consumer habits, but there are also legal liabilities involved that can make the practice risky.Â
To clear this hurdle, some savvy businesses are turning to payment platforms to provide processing analytics on each transaction. Done well, and businesses don’t have to worry about compliance, annoyed customers, fraud, or costly lawsuits.
One of our newest partners at KORONA POS, MARBI, is a great payment processing analytics solution, providing data-rich insights and a wealth of other ways to help businesses become more successful. Better yet, it can be implemented in minutes. Once the processing solution is connected to the POS, users need only to log in to the backend of their system to access all the analytics that the solution offers. Let’s look more at what exactly they do.
What Are PaymentAnalytics?
Payment analytics use the data from digital payments such as credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, and digital checks to get insights into customer preferences and business performance. The data from these transactions is too complex to be understood directly but can be incredibly advantageous to businesses when it’s translated by a payment analytics platform into charts and spreadsheets. Such digestible data gives business owners the information they seek quickly and efficiently.Â
In the more nascent days of this technology, the processing of this information required infrastructure changes, hardware purchases, and extensive training. But modern cloud-based solutions, such as MARBI, make these insights available to businesses without any upfront costs or learning curves.
There are some key advantages that payment analytics provide businesses. You can get data in real-time, analyze multi-channel performance, identify trends, target marketing, and even flag fraud.
Advantages of Real-Time Processing Data
Businesses have a finite amount of resources to invest in developing and promoting products and services, making the ability to analyze customer preferences in real-time extremely helpful. For example, if you can immediately notice that the new calendar print you’ve put up on your eCommerce site is catching on in a certain region, you can increase your digital ad placement in that part of the country and pull the advertising from areas where there is less interest.Â
The same approach can be used for selling services, noticing what services are more popular in certain markets at different times, and gaining more insight into specific demographics of your shoppers.
Analyze Performance Across Channels
Today’s businesses often operate on multiple fronts, with physical and virtual locations and options. Using a single payment and analytics system for the entire business can help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
For example, if your business offers tax preparation with physical locations throughout the country, you have probably started to implement virtual online options to make the experience more convenient. Using a system that integrates credit card transaction data with business analytics means that you could see which physical locations are usually empty and which are more frequented. In turn, this allows you to better target your new virtual options.
Such information presents a great opportunity to reduce costs by closing physical offices in these locations without loss of revenue, while keeping physical offices open in places where people aren’t comfortable conducting their business online.
See Related: How to Analyze Retail Sales Trends with Your Point of Sale
Identify Trends To Gain New Customers
Purchasing trends by your customers can often predict emerging larger trends that have yet to be acknowledged by the industry. This is especially true for businesses that sell products and services to young people.Â
Toys, for instance, can go from the most popular item on the market to completely worthless overnight. This means it’s crucial that you closely monitor how well products are performing to avoid having a warehouse full of items that nobody wants.
Getting this type of data immediately allows you to pick up on trends that your competitors are unlikely to have yet noticed. And like any trend, being an early adopter can pay dividends in the long run. Such data is vital to keeping ahead of the curve and continuing to scale your business.
Target Your Marketing To Customers
For some types of businesses, the data obtained from the platforms that combine payment processing and analytics can yield information that can be used to target offers to specific customers.
Payment processing analytics data, for instance, can reveal that a business is losing customers because they lack certain offerings. Likewise, the data could reveal that a certain product or promotion is gaining your business new customers. In the end, you can target shoppers with more customized digital ads and promotions.
The data mined from payment processing transactions can also provide ideas for marketing products to specific demographics of their shoppers. Remember that the obvious solution isn’t always correct, so it’s important to keep running tests to see what sells and who’s buying it.
Automated Fraud Alerts
Credit card companies use artificial intelligence to reduce and prevent fraud, and your business can benefit from access to this information, too. For example, if your customer that usually buys a new pair of $100 sneakers every couple of months suddenly places an order for five pairs of $2,000 Prada boots, there’s a good chance something is amiss.Â
The best payment processing programs with analytics will flag this for you even if your credit card company misses it so that you don’t lose inventory. A call or email to the customer to double-check their order can reduce or eliminate these fraudulent transactions altogether.
The Cost of Doing Nothing Is High
The reality is that most businesses have employed, or are planning to employ, cloud-based payment processing analytics. This leaves businesses that don’t use their customer’s data at a huge disadvantage. It’s much more difficult for businesses without these tools to compete.
Processing analytics offer users more insight into their customers, allowing you to cater promotions and product lines. The data is driven in real-time, giving users immediate insight. And the benefits go beyond customer insight with advanced fraud protection technology, protecting both your shoppers and your store.
Processing Analytics with KORONA POS
Combining payment analytics into the costs of your processing is a great opportunity for retailers. Processing costs are unavoidable. You might as well make the most of them and get an additional service out of the package. It’s seamless to integrate and only requires that you keep your POS and credit card terminals connected. That’s what makes our partners like MARBI so intriguing.
To learn more about how MARBI works and to get a quote on processing costs, sign up for a free trial below. There are no commitments and it’s simple to get started.
