Your clients have to provide seamless and convenient customer experiences end-to-end if they are going to beat out competitors. However, the ease with which customers can find products or sign up for services isn't going to matter if payments are bottlenecking sales. Omni-commerce eliminates payment bottlenecks regardless of how, when, or where customers want to pay, keeping your clients' revenue streams flowing.
Consumers have a baseline expectation for quick, seamless, and secure transactions. If they can't get that experience from your vertical software as a service (SaaS) clients, they will find it somewhere else. It is not enough to just have the best omnichannel commerce experience. Your clients need payments that are as simple as "put it on my card."
Omni-commerce is a fancy term for payments that don't make customers work to give your clients their money. Whether they are responding to an in-person upsell or signing up for a class online, the payments user experience is always the same. PayEngine's omni-commerce payments solution gives your clients a frictionless, integrated payment system across all channels. Read on to find out how PayEngine can give you the competitive advantage in your SaaS vertical.
The Role of Omni-Commerce in an Omnichannel World
Whether a transaction begins offline, online, or over the phone, customers expect fluid and painless transitions between channels. Their experience signing up for a class in an app should be indistinguishable from their experience in person. Omnichannel technology integrates sales and marketing channels to provide that seamless customer experience.
Omni-commerce takes convenience a step further into the consumer payment experience. Checkout becomes as easy as tapping a button or saying "yes" to confirm a purchase. Consumers don't have to fumble for a wallet or look up credit card information. They can also use the same payment methods and have the same payment experience regardless of where or when they are paying. That ease of use keeps customers coming back and helps to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
For example, a gym management SaaS provider can employ omni-commerce to give their clients frictionless payments and one-click checkout experiences across all channels. Whether their clients' customers are booking a class online, paying for a training session on their mobile device, or picking up a bottle of water on their way into the gym, the experience and payment methods are always the same.
A better payment experience also means more sales. Consider that bottle of water. From the consumer's perspective, every step in the checkout process is like an added charge. By the time they wait in line, find their wallet or phone, and confirm the sale, the convenience cost has gone up significantly. On the other hand, if grabbing and paying for water is as simple as taking a towel on their way in, buying your clients' water may be a better deal than bringing water with them.
The same goes for other verticals, even ones such as cleaning or HVAC maintenance. Consumers who are driven primarily by cost don't hire someone to clean their homes. Home service customers value convenience, and being able to schedule and pay for services without more than a quick phone call can be as valuable to them as a big discount. Convenience makes your clients competitive.
Clients in vertical SaaS categories also benefit from a staffing and management perspective with PayEngine's omni-commerce solutions. Unified payments are simpler to manage, and staff don't have to learn multiple systems and interfaces. Your clients can focus less on managing payments and more on their actual business.
Why Omni-Commerce Matters for Vertical SaaS
Just as omni-commerce capabilities make your clients more competitive, offering them as part of your vertical SaaS platform positions you better in the marketplace. Your clients need seamless, cross-channel payment solutions, and if they cannot get them from you, they will find someone else. At best, that means keeping your platform for all their other needs and running a separate payment solution. At worst, it means losing a client completely.
However, omni-commerce payments don't just make you more competitive and encourage deeper client integration with your platform. The same management and staffing gains your clients realize apply to your business as well. Integrated payment processing simplifies your own overhead and operations compared to serving and maintaining multiple processes across different channels. With PayEngine, you get API payment integration and customized professional support to ensure everything from fraud prevention to reporting and analytics runs without a hitch.
How Integrated Payments Make Omni-Commerce Possible
Integrating a payment gateway with a merchant's other business systems, such as their e-commerce platform or point-of-sale (POS) system, is a central element of omni-commerce. Integrated payments allow merchants to accept payments from all channels in one place, using a single payment solution.
Your clients' customers never have to re-enter payment information or pull out a card in-store that is already registered with their account. They can use the same mobile wallet online and off. Consumers expect to be able to say, “Bill my card on file,” or, “Just add this to my tab,” and businesses need to be able to follow through. At the same time, your clients gain the added benefit of being able to track all of their transactions through a single interface.
Reaching those promised benefits, however, is neither seamless nor easy without the right partner. Cross-platform, integrated systems are essential for omni-commerce, but they can be difficult to implement and manage. It is not something that can be faked with user interfaces or by patching systems together on the backend.
PayEngine handles the heavy lifting of integrated payments with custom-label solutions that operate with or without devices. PayEngine's custom devices support pairs directly with your online or e-commerce checksout -- or PayEngine can be easily integrated into existing POS systems. No-code, low-code, and API integrations coupled with technical support from a team of experienced engineers and more than 50 years of combined payments industry experience, enable both you and your clients to focus on core products and services.
Implementing Omni-Commerce Step-By-Step
1. Assess Your Payment System
Before deploying a new omni-commerce solution, you need to understand how your current solutions measure up and identify the potential challenges along the road ahead. You will want to know how your offline and online platforms interact and what aspects of each already work well for your clients and their customers.
Examine how you handle payment processing, including whether you are using the same or different processors in different channels. Look for areas where a lack of consistency is currently creating problems. Determine what features are most important for your clients and their customers, whether they are using a physical POS or an online payment gateway.
All of this will help you to better understand what you need while also identifying the most important changes you need to make. PayEngine's knowledge and expertise in partnering with vertical SaaS companies provide you with the insights you need to assess your needs effectively.
2. Choose the Right Solution
There are plenty of omni-commerce payments solutions available for vertical SaaS providers and finding the right solution for you and your clients requires careful consideration. You need a solution that supplies features, ease of use, and a pricing structure that fits. However, these are not the only considerations when choosing the right omni-commerce partner for your SaaS vertical.
Other service aspects you should keep in mind include:
- Reliability: Transaction delays and failed payments frustrate clients and their customers, leading to lost sales and cart abandonment. PayEngine's proven track record and unparalleled support make it a partner you can rely on to keep sales moving forward.
- Security: Data breaches, fraud, and disruptions from outside attacks can cause both financial and reputational loss for you and your clients. PayEngine takes care of the technical side of security, including fraud prevention and data encryption, as well as handling regulatory compliance for your omni-commerce solution.
- Scalability: Your payment solution needs to effortlessly scale with you and your clients to ensure against outages and slowed transactions. PayEngine's cloud-enabled omni-commerce payment solutions make growth easy and are ready to scale with you.
- Support: Even with an omni-commerce platform that is running without a hitch, you need a partner that provides reliable support to help you grow and stay up to date on trends and features. PayEngine's deep understanding of the vertical SaaS industry, an engineering team specialized in payments architecture, and commitment to customer support ensure you have what you need to succeed at every step.
3. Integrate with Your Vertical SaaS Platform
Integrating an omni-commerce solution into your vertical SaaS platform is often the most technically demanding and time-consuming step. However, the right partner will handle most of the work for you, enabling you to stay focused on your vertical and clients.
The right payment partner will provide seamless integration that is customized to you and your clients' needs while also helping you to identify the best solution for your vertical. They will work with you to troubleshoot any problems along the way and maintain the same level of support once your integration is complete.
Moving to a new payment solution means migrating customer and payment data, and you need that to happen without downtime or interruptions. Payment gateway integration also means handling payment gateway API integration without overtaxing or tying up your engineers. With PayEngine's pre-built integrations and API support and documentation, this step is greatly simplified.
4. Test Across Channels
Before your new omni-commerce solution goes live, you will need to run test purchases across all channels. You will also want to follow this same process each time you add a new client. This can be a time-consuming process, and it is not always easy to ensure every possible problem has been accounted for.
PayEngine makes testing your payment solutions easy with dedicated support that is available when you need it. The PayEngine team's deep experience with vertical SaaS payments ensures your payment testing does not overburden your staff or inconvenience your clients.
5. Feedback and Iteration
You can stay ahead of potential problems by keeping a close eye on how your omni-commerce platform performs. That means both listening to and seeking client feedback, but it is also helped by detailed data on the transactions moving through your system.
PayEngine's data analytics and reports help both you and your clients to keep track of evolving trends and track performance. You can easily identify opportunities to reduce costs and improve customer service, as well as recognize developing needs.
The Omni-Commerce Benefits for Vertical SaaS
Omni-commerce payments give your vertical SaaS company an edge over competitors and ensure you are providing your clients and their customers with the experience they expect.
1. Omni-commerce enhances customer satisfaction with easier and more consistent payment experiences.
2. Omni-commerce streamlines business operations with integrated payments by reducing the number of systems needed to manage and track payments.
3. Omni-commerce simplifies payment management for vertical SaaS clients by allowing them to track everything in one place.
4. Omni-commerce sets vertical SaaS companies apart in competitive markets and ensures your clients don't have to look elsewhere for the services they need.
5. Omni-commerce enables deeper client integration with your vertical SaaS platform, ensuring you are their one-stop shop for everything they do.
Putting Omni-Commerce to Work for You
Modern consumers lead complicated, connected lives with endless distractions competing for their time. Anything that slows down or complicates a payment becomes a surcharge for consumers who have grown used to digital wallets and contactless payments. This new reality has made Omni-commerce payments a must-have in every vertical.
Actually providing your vertical SaaS clients with hassle-free customer experiences is not without its own hassles though. Creating in-store and mobile payment user experiences that just work on the front end takes a lot of work on the back end. It requires a deep understanding of SaaS and of your vertical. It also requires equal knowledge and expertise in payment security and fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and payment processing.
Partnering with PayEngine can make that heavy lift seem light. As an omni-commerce partner specializing in vertical SaaS, PayEngine brings the experience you need for successful implementation across every channel. If you want to know more about how PayEngine can make your omni-commerce aspirations a reality, schedule a demo today.
