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Your Payments Strategy is Essential for Mobile and International Success with Adyen's Brian Mapley
Payments are a part of eCommerce that’s easily ignored – just leave it to the finance team. But they really shouldn’t be ignored. Sorting out your payments systems and strategy can have a fundamental impact on your business growth. Increasing conversions by giving the customers the options they want, making mobile payment straightforward, enabling overseas success AND giving you data you can use to further personalise communications. Our hosts Phill Kay from Segmentify and Chloe Thomas from eCommerce MasterPlan are joined by Adyen’s Brian Mapley to make this seemingly complex topic simple.
Welcome to the eCommerce growth show brought to you by Segmentify the fast lean learning machine, the fastest learning, most revenue generating personalisation platform for eCommerce.
Chloe Thomas:
Hello, can you believe it? We are over halfway through the first-ever series of the eCommerce Growth show. This is the series where we’re focusing in on what you as a retailer need to know about to take your sales growth to the next level in 2020. Each of our six episodes focuses on a different area that’s essential for maximising eCommerce growth. Already live are our interviews with big Commerce’s, head of Europe, Mark Adams Segmentify’s own Murat Soysal and Gavin Laugenie from Dotdigital. So yes, we’ve already looked at how you can turn the changing tech space into a competitive advantage, at what onsite personalisation strategies the best retailers are adopting, and how to shift your customer communications from the volume game to something far more granular and profitable. A pretty cool first half to the series.
Chloe Thomas:
All that is available for you to listen to right now via your podcast app of choice. So Apple Podcast, Spotify, Podcast Addict, etc. etc. And please remember to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss the ones we’ve got coming up, where we’ll be focusing on how post-purchase effects growth. In this episode, we’re covering three interlinked big topics: Payments, Mobile, and International. I’m Chloe Thomas, I’m the host of the eCommerce Master Plan podcast, bestselling author of multiple books on eCommerce and the cohost of this show. Right. I’m joined on every episode of this series by Phill Kay from Segmentify. Hello Phill.
Phill Kay:
Hello Chloe.
Chloe Thomas:
How are you doing today?
Phill Kay:
I’m good, I’m good. Thank you. How are you?
Chloe Thomas:
I’m good. I’m excited to learn more about payment strategies because I have a feeling it’s going to be a big topic this year, so I’m quite excited that we’re getting in early with it. So why did you want to include Brian from Adyen as a guest in this series?
Phill Kay:
Well, that’s a great question. I mean, I’ve been around in the eCommerce world for a number of years now, and I actually saw Adyen start to rise, I suppose if you like. I’ve been involved in eCommerce partnerships for a good few years now, and out on the circuit if you like and talking to Brian’s. I just noticed Adyen coming into the frame more and more. And thought to myself, well I’ve got to find out about these guys and what they’re doing. And, so when I was chatting to them and finding out more about what they did, it really struck me that what they were doing was something quite disruptive and quite unique in the market. And that was a number of years ago when it just started. And I noticed actually when I went to a few events that they were talking at, so they were really compelling to the audiences. These were brands of agencies and agencies themselves and it was like, “Wow, there’s something going on there.”
Phill Kay:
There’s a bit of noise and a bit of rumble around Adyen and they’re getting a lot of interest and a lot of people going up to them to talk and chatting to the staff. I just thought well I’m going to have to keep these guys on our radar. In terms of empowering our team, which is what part of my job is to do, to make sure that talking to brands and retailers about all sorts of stuff. It could be personalisation, but it could also be payments or it could be platforms or whatever. So I always hold that in my back pocket in terms of trying to communicate that back to the team. And, so obviously Adyen, I was like people need to hear about this because they’re doing something unique out there.
Phill Kay:
They’re disrupting the market and making it incredibly simple to do everything. They’re the acquirer and they’re the gateway and they bring all the other payments into one place. I’m like, “Wow, they’re doing something here that other people aren’t.” And I suppose that was a reason why we reached out to Brian then and had a chat with him at lunch and lovely guy. And obviously we have a second and starts to partner with them effectively. So I thought it would be really useful to bring him in on this series and get him to share if you don’t know much about Adyen and what they do all about what noise they’re making out there in the market, and how they can hopefully help you.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah, exactly. And I think payments strategies is just such an important thing for 2020. So guys, what you’ve got coming up in this episode is we’re going to take you through why you should care about payment strategies. If you’re thinking payment’s boring, I don’t care, trust me, you will not be by the time he gets to the end of this episode, we’re also going to talk about what steps to take to build your payment strategy. And then, because if that wasn’t enough, we’re going to have to talk about two other hot topics for 2020 which is mobile and international, and get fairly deep into ways which you can quickly improve your performance in both of those. And if you’re thinking of diving into either of those properly this year, then some things you need to consider before you get started. So Phill, are you ready to get our guest on?
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. Let’s do it.
Chloe Thomas:
It’s time to welcome our guest. Brian Mapley is the head of Mid-Market UK Sales at Adyen. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to understand how getting your payment strategy right can have a positive impact on your business growth, then Brian is the one you need to hear from. Adyen who’ve been helping merchant furnish their payments from around the world since 2006. They’ve got offices in over 20 different countries and in 2018 processed over 159 billion euros of payments. Hello Brian.
Brian Mapley:
Hello, how are you doing?
Chloe Thomas:
I’m good, thanks. How are you?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah very good.
Phill Kay:
Hello Brian. How are you doing?
Brian Mapley:
Hi Phill, I’m good.
Phill Kay:
So I hear the Adyen they call you the milkman. Why is that?
Brian Mapley:
So I thought you might bring that one up. So I’ve been at Adyen just short of seven years now. And obviously, when we first started, we were quite a small team, small sales team, and in one of the early sales meetings we were just talking through some of the merchants that we work with and I was listing off mine and I said, well I always deliver, that’s why they call me the milkman. And it just stuck throughout the year. So everyone just refers me, somebody, as the milkman.
Phill Kay:
That is a very good nickname because you deliver.
Brian Mapley:
Every time.
Phill Kay:
Brillant. So let’s talk about payment strategy. I’m really interested to hear about how a great payment strategy can help our listeners grow their businesses. Why don’t you tell us a little?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, no problem at all. So let’s take a few steps back there and say, let’s go back a few years. So in the old world, brands were more powerful than customers. So the brand was everything. So brands controlled, that pure shopping experience. So you probably know the time when we were youngsters. Where you had to go into a store. So every town had all of the brands and you’d go into the local store all those years ago. If I wanted the latest album of my favourite rock band, I’d going to probably one of the local stores. And if I had a selection of stock and if that stock was out of stock they had no clue when they were going to get that stock in. They had no clue whether the same store in the next village or the next village after that had got the stock.
Brian Mapley:
So you’d have to get on a bus, get a car, get in the car, get your parents to take you wherever to try and find that item that you wanted and you go into the next town. And, I think that was the shopper experience at those times, but let’s fast forward to today. And technology has changed everything. Smartphones are now the research engines, they’re the purchasing vehicles. So the consumer is now in charge, and now they want to buy and pay on the go. In the new world, customers are on the driver seat. They choose how to interact with a brand, and the payment strategy has to be built around this. As consumers like me and you go, we expect convenience anytime or anywhere, and companies can struggle to meet their expectations and our expectations.
Brian Mapley:
And sometimes they disappoint us at times. So brands have to reinvent themselves now or the customers will simply go anywhere else because there’s so much choice out there. And again, harping back to when we used to go out shopping or you got out in the evening, and you’d queue up an ATM and you’d be really disappointed that you can only get 250 quid out in one day of a cash machine. But people don’t carry cash anymore because that’s not how lifestyle is.
Phill Kay:
I’ve had cash for years in my wallet.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. But again, do you even take your wallet out now these days?
Phill Kay:
No I don’t get a wallet, you are right.
Brian Mapley:
Most of us want to get a taxi or an Uber in London, New York, Paris, etc. And have our card registered in a payment app. And in the knowledge that when we go and complete that journey, that payment is already taken care of. Most of us want to go to a theme park, say for it again somewhere like Lego and take our family an example, and not to worry about carrying our wallets around. We want to wear wearable tech that can touch and go at any touchpoint and buy anything during the course of that visit. Whether it’s a burger, whether it’s merchandise or where it’s fast-tracked onto that new ride. So again, it’s that ability to go touch and go. So some of us want to turn up at football matches like myself, say at Spurs Stadium for example, and just take our membership card and that becomes that one card full of transactions around the stadium into the food, drink, scarfs, programs, etc.
Brian Mapley:
And then I want a notification, that’d say Kane has bagged a last-minute winner. And I get a short URL with his shirt number and name included, and it takes me straight through to a payment page to complete that transaction. I want to be playing mobile games on my phone even while I’m sitting on the train, on the bus, or even in the loo and complete that in-game purchase with just one click. We want to know that we can download the last seven series of Lost for instance on our favourite streaming service or listening to our favourite tunes on Spotify, safe in our knowledge that our monthly subscription payment is taken care of. On a Friday night we want to order pizza from our favourite takeaway marketplace app, knowing that our payment details are already stored and that payment is already completed. I want to go into my favourites sports store, buying another pair of trainers. Just don’t tell the wife because she will kill me.
Brian Mapley:
I don’t want to queue at the two I don’t want to queue at the two. I’ve got more pairs of trainers on about. I want this shop assistant to be able to come to me and to take that transaction while standing in the store, anywhere in the store by purchase, and if I go to that next door. If I’m a tourist or tourists in our now major cities now want to pay their own countries, pay methods at point of sale, which has never been seen before with the likes of Ali-Pay, UnionPay, and We-Chat Pay. But again, as consumers ourselves, we don’t just want to pay by cards now, we want to use the latest payment methods without the Apple Pay, Google Pay or the use of the now, you buy now pay later methods.
Brian Mapley:
But most of all want to make that retail purchase on the go anywhere on any device. And when we do buy online, we want to be able to return the item to our local store on the same transaction without any wait or any hassle. I think the examples I’ve given show that there is a fundamental power shift happening in the world at the moment. Apps deliver goods and services instantly and conveniently. Payments is now frictionless and often invisible, brands have had to endure and the flourishing ones while the others are floundering, are the ones that have embraced those changes in payments. And have come up with a payment strategy that includes a lot of what I’ve been talking about. But then again, there’s more to that than that. I mean this includes all the latest payments that may happen. However, the key to this is being able to see all those payment channels in one place without the need to contact with multiple providers.
Brian Mapley:
Retailers need a stream that’s linked between online and offline transactions while improving customer engagements and interactions by helping make better use of valuable payment data. We all remember the times right before we had smartphones. So I mean if you can imagine what you used to carry around with you, before you had a smartphone, you had a camera, you had calendars, you had faxes, you had pages, you had those huge mobile phones that used to carry on your shoulder with terrible ring tones. You had gaming devices. I mean how painful was that? Then all of a sudden that smartphone became that one device that everyone wanted, and that means you had, everything, with one provider and Adyen has done same with that end to end payment process. So being able to be the gateway and the acquirer, the merchant account with an inbuilt fraud tool talking directly to card schemes, providing all of those payment channels, eCommerce, app, mobile, Moto, wearable point of sale, all in one back office.
Phill Kay:
And what does it mean the gateway and the acquirer?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, so traditionally there was always separate companies or third parties trying to complete a payment flow. So you had a gateway provider, you had an acquirer, which totally tracking the card schemes together, authorisation, and then you’d have another third party, in the photo. And all of those guys would try and integrate together to create that payment plan. But what would happen is, one might drop out and then the payment plan would drop and then they’re going to be trying to blame each other to what was happening or what was going wrong in my instance. What Adyen did is built out from the ground up on one platform. So we’re not interlinked with any other third parties. We don’t need a third party to complete on payment flow. So everything was built in house. And by doing that, there’s no split between your payment gateway and acquirer. We talk directly to the card schemes and we do that so we can get high authorisation and we can make that journey better for that consumer.
Chloe Thomas:
So Brian, when it comes to payment strategy, I always think when we put the word strategy on something, it’s like that point a which someone’s gone, “I actually need to be proactive about this and not just let it evolve.” So I imagine we’ve got quite a lot of people listening who if they weren’t already having just heard you talk through everything in so much detail and thank you for doing that. They’ve probably gone, “Oh okay, I need to really care about this, and I need to get proactive about it.” For them who you’ve just let it evolve and they’ve added this and they’ve added that and they’ve got something. And to be honest, they didn’t really know how it’s all working. For them what’s the first step to putting that proactive payment strategy in place, the one that’s really going to help them enhance their sales this year?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, they’re really the one that so you can enhance it I think it’s looking at your current payment provider. And can they provide everything that I’ve just discussed over the last probably five minutes about can you add that ability to offer all of your channels, all of the payment channels that you want that’s going to make an increase in your revenues, but can you offer all of theirs channels, can you offer those and see all of that data in one back office?
Brian Mapley:
So can you match up where your online transactions and your offline transactions marry, and can you then also if someone buys online, can they then refund that transaction potentially in a store on that same transaction. And then that would then build on to be able to take that one stage further, is that customer data and then what you can do to help with that so they can marry that with what’s in your basket and building customer loyalty and then reaching out to customers say, “Actually we notice you purchased this at this stage. What can we do then to make that revenue grow further?”
Chloe Thomas:
And I suppose once you’ve got everything in the right place, it’s just for one sanity makes a lot of sense. You’re getting a lot of data there. About what payment methods people are actually using on what devices and so forth. And presumably that can then help you take your payment strategy to the next level by analysing that data.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, and the cool thing about that is we’ve shown that we’ve done that with multiple merchants at different times. So say Vue Cinema for instance, right? How crowded now is the cinema scene? You’ve got such a great choice of which cinemas you want to go to. So Vue Cinema chose us because we could then use as a payments inside, tie that with that basket data so we can tell whether someone’s buying popcorn or not buying popcorn, what film they’re watching, what genre of film because they can then choose. And so that means what you can now do is they can feed that into customer loyalties. “Actually, we noticed you watch this, why don’t you come back to us and watch this and we’ll give you a discount. We know you actually purchased this. Why don’t you have that pre-ordered before you come back to us and we’ll have it ready for you?” So again, it’s being able to use that customer data in a way, you are empowering your customers. They’ll come back to you and continually shop and spend more money with you.
Chloe Thomas:
I mean just being a bit, possibly a bit too future thinky here. So feel free to tell me if I’m being too big sky. But presumably, that would then take us to the point wherein that Vue instance we can see that this person buys a family set of tickets on the tablet on a Friday evening for the weekend. But they buy date night tickets on the mobile on a Monday morning, and then send them the right messages at the right time, so they get the latest Minions film on a Friday, but they get the latest rom-com on a Monday. Being very simplistic about it.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah correct. Because you can do exactly that because we’re tying that payment data that Adyen is providing. So we get how much are they spending, and where they’re spending it back with a basket data of what was actually bought. So again, whether it’s that romcom or was that horror film or that it was a children’s film. And they can use that data then to then push back to their customers to say, “Actually, we noticed you’ve watched this, then why not watch a similar film?” Okay and at the same time.
Chloe Thomas:
Cool. And there’s two big, I’m going to give you the option of which one we talk about first here. There are two huge eCommerce topics that a lot of people are talking about at the moment. One is the opportunity of going international and the other is getting mobile right. And I know, and I know you know that payment is going to have a big impact in both those areas. So which one would you like to talk to us about the first mobile or international?
Brian Mapley:
International if that’s all right.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah, let’s do it.
Brian Mapley:
Because I think one of the key things Adyen that we built really on early is that we notice those key iconic British brands that wanted to go international but really had no clue how to do that. The global eCommerce market projections have doubled by the end of this year, from 2 trillion to 4 trillion. On top of that, there are always reports and it’s predicted that the flow of goods and services will triple across borders. So international merchants need to know how to go international because, again I’ve been adding nearly seven years and the time and time again merchants say to me, “Brian, I want to go into Europe, I want to go into China. They’ll just take cards right?” And that is never the case.
Brian Mapley:
You know, if a merchant says “Brian I want to go into, say Holland,” for instance, you’ve got to understand that 75% of the population will want to pay by what’s called iDEAL, which is a bank to bank transfer and payment method. So if you offer cards, just pure cards and that in Holland, you’re not going to take many transactions. And the same to be said in many other countries across Europe as well. Say whether that is, say Germany for instance, again not very card centric country they want to pay something like buy now, pay later pay methods like Klarna’s or [Inaudible 00:20:34] because they don’t want something on credit card. But further, it fell from that, it gets really, really interesting when it comes to different payment methods.
Brian Mapley:
So if you want to go in for China, for instance, we’ve taken many companies into China, [Mishoniv 00:20:48], Prompt and Bikes, etc, and you’ve got to go offering your Adyen Pays, your UnionPays, your We-Chat Pays because local payment methods, the key important if you’re looking to grow the revenue because that is what people in those countries want to go to see in your annual payment page when they’re clicking through to buy. And if they don’t see those, they will then drop out and you’ve lost that transaction. So you need a payment provider that can provide a solution in every market.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. Because if you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting your home market into one place, into one provider, one dashboard where you can see everything and you can get all that benefits from the data. What you don’t want to then have to do is to log into something else for every other country do you? So yeah you’ve got to have one who can do everything.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. Imagine if you did that, what you just said. Imagine if you did that for the UK, but you could do that globally. I bet you could provide all of the payment methods that you required globally in all the different countries. But not just the payment methods, all the different currencies. You need to be providing those. But as again and again, if we’re talking about helping costs as well, you want to be able to settle into that local currency as well. So you don’t want to be able to have to always settle back to GBP or USD or Euro. So again, it’s the wider picture of payment methods. It’s currencies, but it’s also authorisation rates. You need a payment provider that can have local acquiring in those regions because otherwise everything goes cross border and your authorisations drop. So again there’s no point offering all these different pay methods offering all these different currencies if the authorisation is not going to be the best. So again, it’s using providers like Adyen who have built a global reach to make it one reach one platform for all of our merchants.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. Simplicity. Getting things simple and easy to use is just so essential. Which, brings me onto to my last question, which is mobile mentioned earlier, cannot have you on here and not talk about mobile, because the payments element is one of the biggest barriers to those pesky mobile conversion rates. So have you got a couple of tips for our listeners on how they can, by having a good payment strategy, improve their mobile performance?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. It’s all about customisation for me because I think we’ve all had that experience where we’ve been on the mobile, we’ve been on a tablet and everything is nice and you can see everything on your payment page. It’s having that been extended to do that on to your mobile. So, if it comes through 3-D Secure, etc. But, now with 3-D Secure 2.0, there’re new ways of doing that, whether that’s coming through or biometrics, etc. So it’s being able to optimise that onto to mobile and being applied to payment provider.
Brian Mapley:
Again, I don’t think you can optimise that down to your mobile phone. So everything’s on one page and it’s clear. Otherwise, again, if you’re having to scroll through to see where you need to input your card details, you don’t want to be doing that. And again, you want to be able to use buy it again, Adyen you can tokenise transactions. So again, if you repeat business on your mobile phone, it just becomes that one-click payment. So again, you’re not having to constantly add to your cart all your payment details.
Chloe Thomas:
Thank you, Brian. I think if there’s one word that sums up today, it’s the quest for simplicity, isn’t it? For the customer and for ourselves.
Brian Mapley:
Because yeah, as consumers we want the easiest thing possible to be able to pay. And a lot of that time it’s one click and the amount of times you get fed up of entering in your card details, it’s just annoying, isn’t it? Sometimes you might even drop out because I’m not doing that again. Where if that next transaction it could be one click or if you’ve been in a store and then you go on the online site of that same store, and they’ve already got your card details captured. How cool is that? And that becomes one click, so again it’s that simplicity.
Chloe Thomas:
Well look, Brian, I think before we say goodbye to you, we should really give you an opportunity to tell the listeners a little about Adyen and how they can get in touch with you at Adyen if they’re very interested in getting their payments sorted out this year.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, sure. So feel free to… have talked a lot there about international expansion. You can find my a blog on international expansion at the Adyen website, which is www.adyen.com. Adyen is the full multichannel unified commerce payment experience on one platform. So we do take payments across all channels that I’ve above mentioned, and we can take businesses international, which again are the real key to really looking to grow a business. Are you really looking to drive revenue, then it’s either international or it is unified commerce.
Phill Kay:
Sounds really interesting. I’m learning loads from that Brian. Thank you so much for that. I’m coming from the same angle as you. Obviously we’re in the same role if you like within eCommerce, and it’s incredibly important isn’t it that there are businesses, they differentiate so that you can sustain the services you’re offering to your customers. I mean, if you were to say to me “You’re not being an expert in payments,” what is it about Adyen that makes you have a unique place in the market? “What would you say, almost like an elevator pitch, what would you say to me?” Say, look this is why we are a serious company to be talking to about this side of things. How would you do that? How would you advise that?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, sure. So again, I’ll go back to the one platform solution. So we built it from the ground up. No one has that ability to go for offer the payment gateway, the acquirer, or the merchant account, and being built for two on one platform without involving any other third party. And also it’s that ability as I mentioned before, with taking all of your payments across all of your channels, whether they’re offline or online in one back off in the office for easy reconciliation and all of the payment methods. Then having the relevant payment methods at any given time. So whether it’s at your point of sale, whether that’s on your online, in any particular country that you want to be able to take that in, but then customising that so you’re not filling that checkout full of payment methods. We can tell you which ones are the really well-known ones, and the most used ones and then you can optimise your payment, your checkout as you see fit for those different countries.
Phill Kay:
Wow, that sounds amazing. Thank you so much, Brian.
Chloe Thomas:
It certainly does, doesn’t it? It’s like if you want simplicity, there’s really only one choice. Well Brian, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. You have given us such a great insight into how a payment strategy can help an eCommerce business improve this year. And quite frankly, I think anyone listening who doesn’t have their payment strategy in place and decent software to run it all, they’re just handicapping themselves. So thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Brian Mapley:
No problem. It’s been great. Thank you. Take care.
Chloe Thomas:
Wow, Phill, that was such an insightful session there from Brian. What do you think were the key things from that you’d take away and be telling retailers as you meet them over the coming weeks?
Phill Kay:
Oh yeah, that’s very interesting. I mean, one of the important parts of my role obviously is strategic partnerships, is that I try and work with companies that are really strong in their space, and having a chat with Brian about what Adyen is doing, not only in the UK market but globally. It’s great to see how they’re frankly disrupting the payments market by bringing not only the acquiring side and the payments side into one place, and there really are no barriers to entry in terms of, “Oh you have to use this payment gateway or you have to use that acquire,” or whatever it might be. They’ve clearly been in this space for a long time, seen the niche that they needed to create, and then just went and built it from the ground up.
Phill Kay:
So I mean, that’s for me clearly why they have a very strong presence in the market and a massive potential in the future. And so I think that in itself for me is the reason why I take a partnership with them really seriously. And, we’re going to work strongly with them this year on all sorts of initiatives effectively, to help each other as companies out there and give the right solutions ultimately, to the brands and eCommerce retailers that we’re talking to. I mean, actually one of the very interesting things that we’re potentially going to try and pursue is the ability to add post-sale, particularly on the click and collect or the bricks and mortar side. There’s a window of opportunity post-sale to be able to add actually personalisation into an SMS or some other communication to a smartphone to actually try and increase the basket size through that payment gateway for that retailer.
Chloe Thomas:
So add something, you’ve already paid for your PMP, why don’t you add something…
Phill Kay:
Exactly right so you’re almost… And I’m slightly diverted, but it’s incredible how the partnership and end to end solution can get even more powerful if you think about a scenario where somebody has just bought a pair of jeans and within that token half an hour or whatever it is post-sale that you’re either wandering around the shop or you’re wondering around getting you your Gregg’s Vegan Sausage Roll whatever it is these days. That they can get a ping text or a smart message or something that says, “Hey did you know that you’ve got the belt and the shirt, whatever that goes really well with these jeans in your size in stock by the way, and we’ll give you 20% off.” And then you draw that customer back into the shop and increase their lifetime value with you, like literally within that moment. So, I mean it’s amazing how much we can try and develop this to bring value to ultimately to the client and obviously to then to the customer, which ultimately is what we’re trying to do. So yeah.
Chloe Thomas:
I always think there’s, there’s an element now when any eCommerce retailer is picking their software and picking their partners, their suppliers, which is finding people who are forward-thinking. Because so many businesses I come across these days who are in the mire of not being able to do that. My specialism is marketing problems and driving traffic. And I’m talking about “Why aren’t we doing this?” “Well because we’re stuck on this and they can’t do it. Now our agency can’t build a Google Ads product feed or we can’t do this because of the tech.” And just to be working with partners who are turning around and going, “We’ve just done this with someone. What do you think?” You’re like, “Wow, that’s amazing.”
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. And not only can you do it, but you can do it swiftly because the tech is so simple now these days with platforms like Adyen and Segmentify that you can get this stuff at a very, very affordable price point incredibly quick timeline. So it actually opens up the market to retailers actually might look at technology like this and go, “Do you know? We can’t afford to do this,” but actually now it’s flattening the playing field and making it ever more possible for the small brands to compete and beat even the bigger brands at their own game, because of conversion and revenue and the customer lifetime value, which is what it’s all about, is keeping the customer to that brand using this tech.
Chloe Thomas:
But they can compete only if they’re on a tech platform that enables them to, and I thought that was such an important point that Brian made. What I said is “Where do you start with a pricing strategy?” Well, it’s getting the tech and the foundations in front, in place rather. So as you can actually do these things, but that goes for so many other areas of eCommerce at the moment. And I think we’ll see the winners in 2020 are the ones who put the right techs back in place. All of you listening, I know changing tech is painful and I know it’s complicated, but my goal when you’ve got the right things in place, life is so much easier. It’s so much easier.
Phill Kay:
If you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to go into new territories it’s absolutely critical to get the tech spec right. Obviously there’s always a budget, but the suppliers know that. The companies that are doing well understand that they’ve got their business built the right way to be able to offer these services for you at an affordable level so that you can scale your business with the right tech in the right way. So you have the flexibility and you can make that money comfortably. You know, it’s not going to fall flat on its face because the tech is going to fall over or you’re going to scale too quickly for the tech to keep up with you, or whatever other prices you’ve got to handle.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. It’s so true. Any other key takeaways from what Brian was saying there?
Phill Kay:
Yeah, I did hear he mentioned Spurs. I wasn’t very comfortable with that, but hey, I thought it was really, really insightful. I thought Brian did a great job. Hopefully, you guys have got something out of it, and obviously, really factor your time listening and stuff. But yeah, yeah I’m cool.
Chloe Thomas:
Another great episode though, which I know all of you listening, Phill says he hopes, I know you’re going to have got a lot out of that because Brian shared so much great information.
Phill Kay:
Yeah, definitely.
Chloe Thomas:
Thanks, Phill. Now I have a feeling that for series two, Phill might be banning all mentions of Spurs. Now other than the football that we’ve covered, we’ve covered some big topics in today’s episode, so you should head to segmentify.com/podcast where you can get your hands on all the links and resources mentioned in this episode, and a full transcript. That means a full written version of this whole show that you can print out, save, etc. Via that link, you’ll also find details of the whole series. Right now there are four episodes live and we’ve got another two to release. Coming up in the next episode Phill and I are joined by Sarah Arthrell from Brightpearl, who’ll be telling us all about how a poor post-purchase experience causes all sorts of problems with your social proof, undermining everything you do. Now speaking of social proof, if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or Spotify please do leave us a review there as we’d love to hear what you think of the show.
Chloe Thomas:
Hello, can you believe it? We are over halfway through the first-ever series of the eCommerce Growth show. This is the series where we’re focusing in on what you as a retailer need to know about to take your sales growth to the next level in 2020. Each of our six episodes focuses on a different area that’s essential for maximising eCommerce growth. Already live are our interviews with big Commerce’s, head of Europe, Mark Adams Segmentify’s own Murat Soysal and Gavin Laugenie from Dotdigital. So yes, we’ve already looked at how you can turn the changing tech space into a competitive advantage, at what onsite personalisation strategies the best retailers are adopting, and how to shift your customer communications from the volume game to something far more granular and profitable. A pretty cool first half to the series.
Chloe Thomas:
All that is available for you to listen to right now via your podcast app of choice. So Apple Podcast, Spotify, Podcast Addict, etc. etc. And please remember to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss the ones we’ve got coming up, where we’ll be focusing on how post-purchase effects growth. In this episode, we’re covering three interlinked big topics: Payments, Mobile, and International. I’m Chloe Thomas, I’m the host of the eCommerce Master Plan podcast, bestselling author of multiple books on eCommerce and the cohost of this show. Right. I’m joined on every episode of this series by Phill Kay from Segmentify. Hello Phill.
Phill Kay:
Hello Chloe.
Chloe Thomas:
How are you doing today?
Phill Kay:
I’m good, I’m good. Thank you. How are you?
Chloe Thomas:
I’m good. I’m excited to learn more about payment strategies because I have a feeling it’s going to be a big topic this year, so I’m quite excited that we’re getting in early with it. So why did you want to include Brian from Adyen as a guest in this series?
Phill Kay:
Well, that’s a great question. I mean, I’ve been around in the eCommerce world for a number of years now, and I actually saw Adyen start to rise, I suppose if you like. I’ve been involved in eCommerce partnerships for a good few years now, and out on the circuit if you like and talking to Brian’s. I just noticed Adyen coming into the frame more and more. And thought to myself, well I’ve got to find out about these guys and what they’re doing. And, so when I was chatting to them and finding out more about what they did, it really struck me that what they were doing was something quite disruptive and quite unique in the market. And that was a number of years ago when it just started. And I noticed actually when I went to a few events that they were talking at, so they were really compelling to the audiences. These were brands of agencies and agencies themselves and it was like, “Wow, there’s something going on there.”
Phill Kay:
There’s a bit of noise and a bit of rumble around Adyen and they’re getting a lot of interest and a lot of people going up to them to talk and chatting to the staff. I just thought well I’m going to have to keep these guys on our radar. In terms of empowering our team, which is what part of my job is to do, to make sure that talking to brands and retailers about all sorts of stuff. It could be personalisation, but it could also be payments or it could be platforms or whatever. So I always hold that in my back pocket in terms of trying to communicate that back to the team. And, so obviously Adyen, I was like people need to hear about this because they’re doing something unique out there.
Phill Kay:
They’re disrupting the market and making it incredibly simple to do everything. They’re the acquirer and they’re the gateway and they bring all the other payments into one place. I’m like, “Wow, they’re doing something here that other people aren’t.” And I suppose that was a reason why we reached out to Brian then and had a chat with him at lunch and lovely guy. And obviously we have a second and starts to partner with them effectively. So I thought it would be really useful to bring him in on this series and get him to share if you don’t know much about Adyen and what they do all about what noise they’re making out there in the market, and how they can hopefully help you.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah, exactly. And I think payments strategies is just such an important thing for 2020. So guys, what you’ve got coming up in this episode is we’re going to take you through why you should care about payment strategies. If you’re thinking payment’s boring, I don’t care, trust me, you will not be by the time he gets to the end of this episode, we’re also going to talk about what steps to take to build your payment strategy. And then, because if that wasn’t enough, we’re going to have to talk about two other hot topics for 2020 which is mobile and international, and get fairly deep into ways which you can quickly improve your performance in both of those. And if you’re thinking of diving into either of those properly this year, then some things you need to consider before you get started. So Phill, are you ready to get our guest on?
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. Let’s do it.
Chloe Thomas:
It’s time to welcome our guest. Brian Mapley is the head of Mid-Market UK Sales at Adyen. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to understand how getting your payment strategy right can have a positive impact on your business growth, then Brian is the one you need to hear from. Adyen who’ve been helping merchant furnish their payments from around the world since 2006. They’ve got offices in over 20 different countries and in 2018 processed over 159 billion euros of payments. Hello Brian.
Brian Mapley:
Hello, how are you doing?
Chloe Thomas:
I’m good, thanks. How are you?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah very good.
Phill Kay:
Hello Brian. How are you doing?
Brian Mapley:
Hi Phill, I’m good.
Phill Kay:
So I hear the Adyen they call you the milkman. Why is that?
Brian Mapley:
So I thought you might bring that one up. So I’ve been at Adyen just short of seven years now. And obviously, when we first started, we were quite a small team, small sales team, and in one of the early sales meetings we were just talking through some of the merchants that we work with and I was listing off mine and I said, well I always deliver, that’s why they call me the milkman. And it just stuck throughout the year. So everyone just refers me, somebody, as the milkman.
Phill Kay:
That is a very good nickname because you deliver.
Brian Mapley:
Every time.
Phill Kay:
Brillant. So let’s talk about payment strategy. I’m really interested to hear about how a great payment strategy can help our listeners grow their businesses. Why don’t you tell us a little?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, no problem at all. So let’s take a few steps back there and say, let’s go back a few years. So in the old world, brands were more powerful than customers. So the brand was everything. So brands controlled, that pure shopping experience. So you probably know the time when we were youngsters. Where you had to go into a store. So every town had all of the brands and you’d go into the local store all those years ago. If I wanted the latest album of my favourite rock band, I’d going to probably one of the local stores. And if I had a selection of stock and if that stock was out of stock they had no clue when they were going to get that stock in. They had no clue whether the same store in the next village or the next village after that had got the stock.
Brian Mapley:
So you’d have to get on a bus, get a car, get in the car, get your parents to take you wherever to try and find that item that you wanted and you go into the next town. And, I think that was the shopper experience at those times, but let’s fast forward to today. And technology has changed everything. Smartphones are now the research engines, they’re the purchasing vehicles. So the consumer is now in charge, and now they want to buy and pay on the go. In the new world, customers are on the driver seat. They choose how to interact with a brand, and the payment strategy has to be built around this. As consumers like me and you go, we expect convenience anytime or anywhere, and companies can struggle to meet their expectations and our expectations.
Brian Mapley:
And sometimes they disappoint us at times. So brands have to reinvent themselves now or the customers will simply go anywhere else because there’s so much choice out there. And again, harping back to when we used to go out shopping or you got out in the evening, and you’d queue up an ATM and you’d be really disappointed that you can only get 250 quid out in one day of a cash machine. But people don’t carry cash anymore because that’s not how lifestyle is.
Phill Kay:
I’ve had cash for years in my wallet.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. But again, do you even take your wallet out now these days?
Phill Kay:
No I don’t get a wallet, you are right.
Brian Mapley:
Most of us want to get a taxi or an Uber in London, New York, Paris, etc. And have our card registered in a payment app. And in the knowledge that when we go and complete that journey, that payment is already taken care of. Most of us want to go to a theme park, say for it again somewhere like Lego and take our family an example, and not to worry about carrying our wallets around. We want to wear wearable tech that can touch and go at any touchpoint and buy anything during the course of that visit. Whether it’s a burger, whether it’s merchandise or where it’s fast-tracked onto that new ride. So again, it’s that ability to go touch and go. So some of us want to turn up at football matches like myself, say at Spurs Stadium for example, and just take our membership card and that becomes that one card full of transactions around the stadium into the food, drink, scarfs, programs, etc.
Brian Mapley:
And then I want a notification, that’d say Kane has bagged a last-minute winner. And I get a short URL with his shirt number and name included, and it takes me straight through to a payment page to complete that transaction. I want to be playing mobile games on my phone even while I’m sitting on the train, on the bus, or even in the loo and complete that in-game purchase with just one click. We want to know that we can download the last seven series of Lost for instance on our favourite streaming service or listening to our favourite tunes on Spotify, safe in our knowledge that our monthly subscription payment is taken care of. On a Friday night we want to order pizza from our favourite takeaway marketplace app, knowing that our payment details are already stored and that payment is already completed. I want to go into my favourites sports store, buying another pair of trainers. Just don’t tell the wife because she will kill me.
Brian Mapley:
I don’t want to queue at the two I don’t want to queue at the two. I’ve got more pairs of trainers on about. I want this shop assistant to be able to come to me and to take that transaction while standing in the store, anywhere in the store by purchase, and if I go to that next door. If I’m a tourist or tourists in our now major cities now want to pay their own countries, pay methods at point of sale, which has never been seen before with the likes of Ali-Pay, UnionPay, and We-Chat Pay. But again, as consumers ourselves, we don’t just want to pay by cards now, we want to use the latest payment methods without the Apple Pay, Google Pay or the use of the now, you buy now pay later methods.
Brian Mapley:
But most of all want to make that retail purchase on the go anywhere on any device. And when we do buy online, we want to be able to return the item to our local store on the same transaction without any wait or any hassle. I think the examples I’ve given show that there is a fundamental power shift happening in the world at the moment. Apps deliver goods and services instantly and conveniently. Payments is now frictionless and often invisible, brands have had to endure and the flourishing ones while the others are floundering, are the ones that have embraced those changes in payments. And have come up with a payment strategy that includes a lot of what I’ve been talking about. But then again, there’s more to that than that. I mean this includes all the latest payments that may happen. However, the key to this is being able to see all those payment channels in one place without the need to contact with multiple providers.
Brian Mapley:
Retailers need a stream that’s linked between online and offline transactions while improving customer engagements and interactions by helping make better use of valuable payment data. We all remember the times right before we had smartphones. So I mean if you can imagine what you used to carry around with you, before you had a smartphone, you had a camera, you had calendars, you had faxes, you had pages, you had those huge mobile phones that used to carry on your shoulder with terrible ring tones. You had gaming devices. I mean how painful was that? Then all of a sudden that smartphone became that one device that everyone wanted, and that means you had, everything, with one provider and Adyen has done same with that end to end payment process. So being able to be the gateway and the acquirer, the merchant account with an inbuilt fraud tool talking directly to card schemes, providing all of those payment channels, eCommerce, app, mobile, Moto, wearable point of sale, all in one back office.
Phill Kay:
And what does it mean the gateway and the acquirer?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, so traditionally there was always separate companies or third parties trying to complete a payment flow. So you had a gateway provider, you had an acquirer, which totally tracking the card schemes together, authorisation, and then you’d have another third party, in the photo. And all of those guys would try and integrate together to create that payment plan. But what would happen is, one might drop out and then the payment plan would drop and then they’re going to be trying to blame each other to what was happening or what was going wrong in my instance. What Adyen did is built out from the ground up on one platform. So we’re not interlinked with any other third parties. We don’t need a third party to complete on payment flow. So everything was built in house. And by doing that, there’s no split between your payment gateway and acquirer. We talk directly to the card schemes and we do that so we can get high authorisation and we can make that journey better for that consumer.
Chloe Thomas:
So Brian, when it comes to payment strategy, I always think when we put the word strategy on something, it’s like that point a which someone’s gone, “I actually need to be proactive about this and not just let it evolve.” So I imagine we’ve got quite a lot of people listening who if they weren’t already having just heard you talk through everything in so much detail and thank you for doing that. They’ve probably gone, “Oh okay, I need to really care about this, and I need to get proactive about it.” For them who you’ve just let it evolve and they’ve added this and they’ve added that and they’ve got something. And to be honest, they didn’t really know how it’s all working. For them what’s the first step to putting that proactive payment strategy in place, the one that’s really going to help them enhance their sales this year?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, they’re really the one that so you can enhance it I think it’s looking at your current payment provider. And can they provide everything that I’ve just discussed over the last probably five minutes about can you add that ability to offer all of your channels, all of the payment channels that you want that’s going to make an increase in your revenues, but can you offer all of theirs channels, can you offer those and see all of that data in one back office?
Brian Mapley:
So can you match up where your online transactions and your offline transactions marry, and can you then also if someone buys online, can they then refund that transaction potentially in a store on that same transaction. And then that would then build on to be able to take that one stage further, is that customer data and then what you can do to help with that so they can marry that with what’s in your basket and building customer loyalty and then reaching out to customers say, “Actually we notice you purchased this at this stage. What can we do then to make that revenue grow further?”
Chloe Thomas:
And I suppose once you’ve got everything in the right place, it’s just for one sanity makes a lot of sense. You’re getting a lot of data there. About what payment methods people are actually using on what devices and so forth. And presumably that can then help you take your payment strategy to the next level by analysing that data.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, and the cool thing about that is we’ve shown that we’ve done that with multiple merchants at different times. So say Vue Cinema for instance, right? How crowded now is the cinema scene? You’ve got such a great choice of which cinemas you want to go to. So Vue Cinema chose us because we could then use as a payments inside, tie that with that basket data so we can tell whether someone’s buying popcorn or not buying popcorn, what film they’re watching, what genre of film because they can then choose. And so that means what you can now do is they can feed that into customer loyalties. “Actually, we noticed you watch this, why don’t you come back to us and watch this and we’ll give you a discount. We know you actually purchased this. Why don’t you have that pre-ordered before you come back to us and we’ll have it ready for you?” So again, it’s being able to use that customer data in a way, you are empowering your customers. They’ll come back to you and continually shop and spend more money with you.
Chloe Thomas:
I mean just being a bit, possibly a bit too future thinky here. So feel free to tell me if I’m being too big sky. But presumably, that would then take us to the point wherein that Vue instance we can see that this person buys a family set of tickets on the tablet on a Friday evening for the weekend. But they buy date night tickets on the mobile on a Monday morning, and then send them the right messages at the right time, so they get the latest Minions film on a Friday, but they get the latest rom-com on a Monday. Being very simplistic about it.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah correct. Because you can do exactly that because we’re tying that payment data that Adyen is providing. So we get how much are they spending, and where they’re spending it back with a basket data of what was actually bought. So again, whether it’s that romcom or was that horror film or that it was a children’s film. And they can use that data then to then push back to their customers to say, “Actually, we noticed you’ve watched this, then why not watch a similar film?” Okay and at the same time.
Chloe Thomas:
Cool. And there’s two big, I’m going to give you the option of which one we talk about first here. There are two huge eCommerce topics that a lot of people are talking about at the moment. One is the opportunity of going international and the other is getting mobile right. And I know, and I know you know that payment is going to have a big impact in both those areas. So which one would you like to talk to us about the first mobile or international?
Brian Mapley:
International if that’s all right.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah, let’s do it.
Brian Mapley:
Because I think one of the key things Adyen that we built really on early is that we notice those key iconic British brands that wanted to go international but really had no clue how to do that. The global eCommerce market projections have doubled by the end of this year, from 2 trillion to 4 trillion. On top of that, there are always reports and it’s predicted that the flow of goods and services will triple across borders. So international merchants need to know how to go international because, again I’ve been adding nearly seven years and the time and time again merchants say to me, “Brian, I want to go into Europe, I want to go into China. They’ll just take cards right?” And that is never the case.
Brian Mapley:
You know, if a merchant says “Brian I want to go into, say Holland,” for instance, you’ve got to understand that 75% of the population will want to pay by what’s called iDEAL, which is a bank to bank transfer and payment method. So if you offer cards, just pure cards and that in Holland, you’re not going to take many transactions. And the same to be said in many other countries across Europe as well. Say whether that is, say Germany for instance, again not very card centric country they want to pay something like buy now, pay later pay methods like Klarna’s or [Inaudible 00:20:34] because they don’t want something on credit card. But further, it fell from that, it gets really, really interesting when it comes to different payment methods.
Brian Mapley:
So if you want to go in for China, for instance, we’ve taken many companies into China, [Mishoniv 00:20:48], Prompt and Bikes, etc, and you’ve got to go offering your Adyen Pays, your UnionPays, your We-Chat Pays because local payment methods, the key important if you’re looking to grow the revenue because that is what people in those countries want to go to see in your annual payment page when they’re clicking through to buy. And if they don’t see those, they will then drop out and you’ve lost that transaction. So you need a payment provider that can provide a solution in every market.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. Because if you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting your home market into one place, into one provider, one dashboard where you can see everything and you can get all that benefits from the data. What you don’t want to then have to do is to log into something else for every other country do you? So yeah you’ve got to have one who can do everything.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. Imagine if you did that, what you just said. Imagine if you did that for the UK, but you could do that globally. I bet you could provide all of the payment methods that you required globally in all the different countries. But not just the payment methods, all the different currencies. You need to be providing those. But as again and again, if we’re talking about helping costs as well, you want to be able to settle into that local currency as well. So you don’t want to be able to have to always settle back to GBP or USD or Euro. So again, it’s the wider picture of payment methods. It’s currencies, but it’s also authorisation rates. You need a payment provider that can have local acquiring in those regions because otherwise everything goes cross border and your authorisations drop. So again there’s no point offering all these different pay methods offering all these different currencies if the authorisation is not going to be the best. So again, it’s using providers like Adyen who have built a global reach to make it one reach one platform for all of our merchants.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. Simplicity. Getting things simple and easy to use is just so essential. Which, brings me onto to my last question, which is mobile mentioned earlier, cannot have you on here and not talk about mobile, because the payments element is one of the biggest barriers to those pesky mobile conversion rates. So have you got a couple of tips for our listeners on how they can, by having a good payment strategy, improve their mobile performance?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah. It’s all about customisation for me because I think we’ve all had that experience where we’ve been on the mobile, we’ve been on a tablet and everything is nice and you can see everything on your payment page. It’s having that been extended to do that on to your mobile. So, if it comes through 3-D Secure, etc. But, now with 3-D Secure 2.0, there’re new ways of doing that, whether that’s coming through or biometrics, etc. So it’s being able to optimise that onto to mobile and being applied to payment provider.
Brian Mapley:
Again, I don’t think you can optimise that down to your mobile phone. So everything’s on one page and it’s clear. Otherwise, again, if you’re having to scroll through to see where you need to input your card details, you don’t want to be doing that. And again, you want to be able to use buy it again, Adyen you can tokenise transactions. So again, if you repeat business on your mobile phone, it just becomes that one-click payment. So again, you’re not having to constantly add to your cart all your payment details.
Chloe Thomas:
Thank you, Brian. I think if there’s one word that sums up today, it’s the quest for simplicity, isn’t it? For the customer and for ourselves.
Brian Mapley:
Because yeah, as consumers we want the easiest thing possible to be able to pay. And a lot of that time it’s one click and the amount of times you get fed up of entering in your card details, it’s just annoying, isn’t it? Sometimes you might even drop out because I’m not doing that again. Where if that next transaction it could be one click or if you’ve been in a store and then you go on the online site of that same store, and they’ve already got your card details captured. How cool is that? And that becomes one click, so again it’s that simplicity.
Chloe Thomas:
Well look, Brian, I think before we say goodbye to you, we should really give you an opportunity to tell the listeners a little about Adyen and how they can get in touch with you at Adyen if they’re very interested in getting their payments sorted out this year.
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, sure. So feel free to… have talked a lot there about international expansion. You can find my a blog on international expansion at the Adyen website, which is www.adyen.com. Adyen is the full multichannel unified commerce payment experience on one platform. So we do take payments across all channels that I’ve above mentioned, and we can take businesses international, which again are the real key to really looking to grow a business. Are you really looking to drive revenue, then it’s either international or it is unified commerce.
Phill Kay:
Sounds really interesting. I’m learning loads from that Brian. Thank you so much for that. I’m coming from the same angle as you. Obviously we’re in the same role if you like within eCommerce, and it’s incredibly important isn’t it that there are businesses, they differentiate so that you can sustain the services you’re offering to your customers. I mean, if you were to say to me “You’re not being an expert in payments,” what is it about Adyen that makes you have a unique place in the market? “What would you say, almost like an elevator pitch, what would you say to me?” Say, look this is why we are a serious company to be talking to about this side of things. How would you do that? How would you advise that?
Brian Mapley:
Yeah, sure. So again, I’ll go back to the one platform solution. So we built it from the ground up. No one has that ability to go for offer the payment gateway, the acquirer, or the merchant account, and being built for two on one platform without involving any other third party. And also it’s that ability as I mentioned before, with taking all of your payments across all of your channels, whether they’re offline or online in one back off in the office for easy reconciliation and all of the payment methods. Then having the relevant payment methods at any given time. So whether it’s at your point of sale, whether that’s on your online, in any particular country that you want to be able to take that in, but then customising that so you’re not filling that checkout full of payment methods. We can tell you which ones are the really well-known ones, and the most used ones and then you can optimise your payment, your checkout as you see fit for those different countries.
Phill Kay:
Wow, that sounds amazing. Thank you so much, Brian.
Chloe Thomas:
It certainly does, doesn’t it? It’s like if you want simplicity, there’s really only one choice. Well Brian, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. You have given us such a great insight into how a payment strategy can help an eCommerce business improve this year. And quite frankly, I think anyone listening who doesn’t have their payment strategy in place and decent software to run it all, they’re just handicapping themselves. So thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Brian Mapley:
No problem. It’s been great. Thank you. Take care.
Chloe Thomas:
Wow, Phill, that was such an insightful session there from Brian. What do you think were the key things from that you’d take away and be telling retailers as you meet them over the coming weeks?
Phill Kay:
Oh yeah, that’s very interesting. I mean, one of the important parts of my role obviously is strategic partnerships, is that I try and work with companies that are really strong in their space, and having a chat with Brian about what Adyen is doing, not only in the UK market but globally. It’s great to see how they’re frankly disrupting the payments market by bringing not only the acquiring side and the payments side into one place, and there really are no barriers to entry in terms of, “Oh you have to use this payment gateway or you have to use that acquire,” or whatever it might be. They’ve clearly been in this space for a long time, seen the niche that they needed to create, and then just went and built it from the ground up.
Phill Kay:
So I mean, that’s for me clearly why they have a very strong presence in the market and a massive potential in the future. And so I think that in itself for me is the reason why I take a partnership with them really seriously. And, we’re going to work strongly with them this year on all sorts of initiatives effectively, to help each other as companies out there and give the right solutions ultimately, to the brands and eCommerce retailers that we’re talking to. I mean, actually one of the very interesting things that we’re potentially going to try and pursue is the ability to add post-sale, particularly on the click and collect or the bricks and mortar side. There’s a window of opportunity post-sale to be able to add actually personalisation into an SMS or some other communication to a smartphone to actually try and increase the basket size through that payment gateway for that retailer.
Chloe Thomas:
So add something, you’ve already paid for your PMP, why don’t you add something…
Phill Kay:
Exactly right so you’re almost… And I’m slightly diverted, but it’s incredible how the partnership and end to end solution can get even more powerful if you think about a scenario where somebody has just bought a pair of jeans and within that token half an hour or whatever it is post-sale that you’re either wandering around the shop or you’re wondering around getting you your Gregg’s Vegan Sausage Roll whatever it is these days. That they can get a ping text or a smart message or something that says, “Hey did you know that you’ve got the belt and the shirt, whatever that goes really well with these jeans in your size in stock by the way, and we’ll give you 20% off.” And then you draw that customer back into the shop and increase their lifetime value with you, like literally within that moment. So, I mean it’s amazing how much we can try and develop this to bring value to ultimately to the client and obviously to then to the customer, which ultimately is what we’re trying to do. So yeah.
Chloe Thomas:
I always think there’s, there’s an element now when any eCommerce retailer is picking their software and picking their partners, their suppliers, which is finding people who are forward-thinking. Because so many businesses I come across these days who are in the mire of not being able to do that. My specialism is marketing problems and driving traffic. And I’m talking about “Why aren’t we doing this?” “Well because we’re stuck on this and they can’t do it. Now our agency can’t build a Google Ads product feed or we can’t do this because of the tech.” And just to be working with partners who are turning around and going, “We’ve just done this with someone. What do you think?” You’re like, “Wow, that’s amazing.”
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. And not only can you do it, but you can do it swiftly because the tech is so simple now these days with platforms like Adyen and Segmentify that you can get this stuff at a very, very affordable price point incredibly quick timeline. So it actually opens up the market to retailers actually might look at technology like this and go, “Do you know? We can’t afford to do this,” but actually now it’s flattening the playing field and making it ever more possible for the small brands to compete and beat even the bigger brands at their own game, because of conversion and revenue and the customer lifetime value, which is what it’s all about, is keeping the customer to that brand using this tech.
Chloe Thomas:
But they can compete only if they’re on a tech platform that enables them to, and I thought that was such an important point that Brian made. What I said is “Where do you start with a pricing strategy?” Well, it’s getting the tech and the foundations in front, in place rather. So as you can actually do these things, but that goes for so many other areas of eCommerce at the moment. And I think we’ll see the winners in 2020 are the ones who put the right techs back in place. All of you listening, I know changing tech is painful and I know it’s complicated, but my goal when you’ve got the right things in place, life is so much easier. It’s so much easier.
Phill Kay:
If you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to go into new territories it’s absolutely critical to get the tech spec right. Obviously there’s always a budget, but the suppliers know that. The companies that are doing well understand that they’ve got their business built the right way to be able to offer these services for you at an affordable level so that you can scale your business with the right tech in the right way. So you have the flexibility and you can make that money comfortably. You know, it’s not going to fall flat on its face because the tech is going to fall over or you’re going to scale too quickly for the tech to keep up with you, or whatever other prices you’ve got to handle.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah. It’s so true. Any other key takeaways from what Brian was saying there?
Phill Kay:
Yeah, I did hear he mentioned Spurs. I wasn’t very comfortable with that, but hey, I thought it was really, really insightful. I thought Brian did a great job. Hopefully, you guys have got something out of it, and obviously, really factor your time listening and stuff. But yeah, yeah I’m cool.
Chloe Thomas:
Another great episode though, which I know all of you listening, Phill says he hopes, I know you’re going to have got a lot out of that because Brian shared so much great information.
Phill Kay:
Yeah, definitely.
Chloe Thomas:
Thanks, Phill. Now I have a feeling that for series two, Phill might be banning all mentions of Spurs. Now other than the football that we’ve covered, we’ve covered some big topics in today’s episode, so you should head to segmentify.com/podcast where you can get your hands on all the links and resources mentioned in this episode, and a full transcript. That means a full written version of this whole show that you can print out, save, etc. Via that link, you’ll also find details of the whole series. Right now there are four episodes live and we’ve got another two to release. Coming up in the next episode Phill and I are joined by Sarah Arthrell from Brightpearl, who’ll be telling us all about how a poor post-purchase experience causes all sorts of problems with your social proof, undermining everything you do. Now speaking of social proof, if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or Spotify please do leave us a review there as we’d love to hear what you think of the show.
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