Industry trends update: improving the all-important in-store experience

A Forrester Data Snapshot¹ reports that 63% of U.S. consumers bought products or services in a store in the past three months—more than those who'd purchased using websites (52%) or mobile apps (41%). The 2024 Global Digital Shopping Index² echoes this trend, revealing that 71% of shoppers surveyed across seven countries say physical stores are central to their shopping experience. This report concludes that the brick-and-mortar store "remains as crucial as ever, especially for finalizing purchases and enhancing customer satisfaction."

Retailers appear well aware of the critical nature of the physical store. In a Forrester Data Overview Report,³ 40% of the global business and technology professionals in retail or wholesale who prioritize improving their customer experience say that improving the in-person experience is a key action they're taking to achieve this goal.

So, what steps can retailers take to improve the customer experience in store? Winning strategies include introducing digital features (for consumers to access by themselves or by interacting with associates), offering shoppers choice about how to pay for their purchases, and building a consistent payment experience across channels.

The 2024 Global Digital Shopping Index² highlights things like detailed product information and enabling mobile assistance as digital features that shoppers consider useful in store. The report shows:

• Just 33% of consumers surveyed shop in physical stores without digital assistance
• Shoppers who use mobile assistance report higher satisfaction
• The percentage of transactions involving stores increased from 64% in 2020 to 74% in 2023
   

Adopting POS (point-of-service or point-of-sale) solutions that give employees the ability to use digital capabilities on the retail floor can enhance the experience for customers—through capabilities that go beyond what shoppers can do for themselves with digital features or a mobile app.

According to a Forrester Data Snapshot,⁴approximately one in five U.S. consumers had worked with store associates using handheld devices over the past six months to:

• Get additional information they couldn’t find in-store (22%)
• Complete a transaction (20%)
• Order an out-of-stock item for home delivery or pickup at a later date (15%)
   

Forrester³ indicates that most retail and wholesale organizations opt for POS as they seek benefits like more agility, faster implementation, and easier maintenance. In contrast, says the report: "Legacy on-premises tech built on monolithic architecture is often highly customized, costly to replace, and unable to support the quick moves and flexibility that businesses need today."

Visa Acceptance Solutions can help acquirers and technology partners enable merchants to accept a wide range of payment methods. Our platform connectors streamline integration to the Visa Acceptance Platform for worldwide card-present processing, as well as access to our partner community and service ecosystem that enables the integration of additional digital features into the shopping journey.

Through Cybersource, a part of Visa Acceptance Solutions, we can help merchants build a unified commerce strategy, including in-person payments made via POS terminals or smartphones and tablets enabled as mobile POS. To create unified payment experiences, merchants can use our brand-agnostic Token Management Service. It simplifies network tokenization and, based on the payments data it collects, we can provide a complete view of each shopper's buying behavior across payment types. With richer insights, merchants can create more personalized payment experiences and build deeper relationships with their customers.

We'd love to talk with you about these and other trends and innovations in the payments industry. Please reach out to us to discover how Visa Acceptance Solutions and our uniquely open payments platform can help you build the future of payments.

And look out for our next update for more news and commentary.