What does a seamless buying experience look like?

Within the mobile payments industry, the term ‘buying experience’ is becoming increasingly prevalent as the focus moves away from the enabling technologies and the act of paying, towards enriching interactions with the consumer.

But what does an enhanced buying experience actually look like? To find out, let’s join our Smart Shopper on their lunchtime visit to the local convenience store – ‘AnyStore’.

In-store experience, in-app convenience

Smart Shopper walks into the store and opens up the AnyStore wallet application on their smartphone. Smart Shopper is on a health-kick, so they use the in-app barcode reader to scan a salad and add it to their virtual basket. When doing so, Smart Shopper receives a combo offer notification confirming that a bottle of water is half price when bought with a salad. Knowing the importance of keeping well hydrated, Smart Shopper happily accepts the offer that is automatically redeemed when the water is added to their virtual basket.

It is no coincidence that water, rather than soda, was pushed as part of the combo offer. Since the start of their healthy lifestyle regimen, Smart Shopper’s buying behaviour has changed considerably.

Personalized shopping experience

As AnyStore has direct access to detailed shopping data through the wallet, this shift in purchasing activity has not gone unnoticed. By analyzing past and predicting future behavior, AnyStore can provide smart recommendations to deliver a hyper-personalized buying experience. Not only does this help keep Smart Shopper’s diet on track, but AnyStore can increase transaction amounts and enhance revenues by tailoring offers and promotions to meet the differing requirements of its customers.

Seamless check-out

As you would expect, Smart Shopper is one of the 86% of consumers who avoids stores with long queues (Source: MyCustomer). The Virtual Point of Sale (VPOS) capability of the AnyStore app, however, allows Smart Shopper to check out in-aisle, avoid the lines and make the most of their lunch break. For AnyStore, in-aisle payment functionality not only helps to prevent consumer drop-off, but also lowers overhead costs and reduces the number required POS terminals.

Delivering more value to the shopper

But what makes Smart Shopper really smart is not where they pay, but how they pay.

Smart Shopper has various debit and credit cards loaded into the app, but uses the AnyStore store card thanks to the incentive of a 5% discount. For AnyStore, the discount is more than covered by the reduction in merchant and processing fees.

In addition, Smart Shopper uses the app every time they shop, automatically earning loyalty points and receiving various promotional offers – a task that used to be quite overwhelming. In the US alone, there are 3.3 billion loyalty program memberships, at an average of 29 memberships per household. This complexity, and the logistical headache of cramming various plastic cards and paper coupons into wallets and purses, means 58% of all loyalty program members do not actively participate (Source: Colloquy).

Controlling the payment mix

The AnyStore wallet, however, makes managing value-added services easy. This is because the application allows retailers to connect multiple third-party service providers and convert various forms of digital value into a unified ‘currency’ that can be managed in a value store. In practice, this allows Smart Shopper to pay with credit, points and coupons in a single transaction, controlling the payment ‘mix’ with a simple sliding scale. Because Smart Shopper has built up points, today’s $5.00 bill can be paid with $4.00 in points and $1.00 credit.

Once the transaction is complete, Smart Shopper receives a digitized receipt which is scanned on the way out of the store and added to a complete purchase history. And thanks to the enhanced buying experience delivered by the AnyStore retail wallet, Smart Shopper will be back again. Buying a salad, of course.