Final sprint: more success for retailers with Christmas shopping

• The three most important things about payment

• More sales with NFC-enabled terminals and international payment methods for the point of sale, both for card-present and online transactions

• Get off to a successful start in e-commerce before the Christmas season with Concardis One Page Shop and Paylink

For many retailers, the Christmas season is the most important time of the year. In order to exploit its full potential, sales and marketing managers are already getting ready for the pre-Christmas period. And payment is becoming an increasingly crucial factor for business: in the hectic Christmas season, customers quickly lose interest in shopping if they have to queue for ages in a shop or navigate through complicated checkout processes online. So retailers should examine and optimise their payment processes well in advance. The Eschborn-based full-service payment provider Concardis helps them to do so with the top payment tips for the Christmas period.

1. Get an NFC-enabled terminal
When the shop is busy, things have to go quickly at the point of sale. And nothing is faster than contactless payments – no PIN or signature is needed for amounts of less than €25. And the best thing is that, with an NFC-enabled terminal, retailers are also equipped to accept Apple Pay and other mobile wallets, i.e. payments by smartphone. NFC stands for ‘near field communication’, a contactless transmission technology that eliminates the need to read card data from the chip or magnetic strip.

2. Accept international payment methods
More and more international tourists come to Europe every year to explore Christmas markets and do their Christmas shopping. By accepting the main international credit cards, retailers can delight this customer group with ease of payment. Paying by credit card is much more common internationally than in German-speaking countries, so here too international guests expect to be able to use their familiar payment methods such as UnionPay credit cards. For retailers with many customers from East Asia, it also makes sense to include Alipay in their payment portfolio, because it is the most popular mobile payment solution and lifestyle app in China. Often it doesn’t even require a new terminal – just a software update.

3. Enter the world of e-commerce
Retailers who do not yet use any digital sales channels should think about making a start in e-commerce as soon as possible, because the growth rates in online sales are enormous. This year once again, even more Christmas presents will be bought from the comfort of the sofa. Concardis offers fast and above all low-cost solutions that do not need either a complicated online shop or even your own website: Paylink is a payment link to an online payment site and One Page Shop is a simple shop system that offers payment and platform in one. The latter makes it particularly easy to implement marketing activities using social media channels: vouchers and discounts can be shared with a simple link on all social media platforms.

Both Paylink and One Page Shop are part of the new Concardis Payengine, a complete e-commerce solution. Via a new in-app payment library, the payment platform enables the seamless integration of payment options on mobile devices and lets retailers check cash flows in real time in the back end, which makes managing payments even easier.

The three activities can be implemented quickly and without any great investment, but make a major contribution to an improved customer journey and thus to more sales. The aim is to make payment as simple, safe and fast as possible for the consumer. And it’s worth it: in Germany alone, retail customers spent more than €89 billion in November and December 2016.