SKUx: Enhancing Retail Payment at the Item Level
When a customer pays at retail, it appears seamless enough. For customers, once the transaction is complete, they leave with their purchases. For retailers, however, there are many moving parts and entities behind the scenes that could be more aligned to simplify onboarding new payment capabilities for the merchant. With today’s systems, what’s left on the table are many new customer service oriented payment innovations to support payments linked to item-level information.
Retailers, from independent Main Street brick-and-mortar to physical and online big box stores, have an increasing need for unique transactional acceptance requirements. Streamlining the innovation in the payment systems encompasses two distinct ecosystems: payment and acceptance.
The Payment Side
The payment side involves credit card companies, for example. On the acceptance side sit the point-of-sale (POS) systems where transactions are recorded. The companies in the “payment” ecosystem often don’t consider the range of complexities with gaining broader “acceptance” at merchant point of sale. To muddy the waters further, there are multiple POS systems as well as a bevy of payment vehicles, including credit cards, networks, wallets, fintechs and rails.
“There is a spider web of connections across these roles and, in most cases, payment innovations are coming from the payment ecosystem driven by their business objectives,” said Guy Berg, Senior Vice President of SKUPay Network “Frequently, there is a disconnect between their [payment] objectives and what the merchants need. Ideally, the merchant acceptance ecosystem would have the ability to more rapidly adopt payment innovations.”
SKUPay: A Novel Merchant-Driven Payment Solution
So, what’s on the merchants’ wish lists from a transaction perspective? According to Berg, payments that would drive greater customer engagement, increase share of shopping wallets and/or drive traffic to their stores are examples of payments that align with merchant priorities. For example, a payment-based promotion that can only be applied to an approved private label item or store location. Imagine if a merchant could easily define and send out payment-based promotions that could only be used for one or more items in an eligible list.
Enter SKUx.
Retailers can work with SKUx in advance to determine SKUPay promotion-eligible products. This intelligent payment program can be connected to predetermined approved products via a digital prepaid card. This allows a merchant to create item-level parameters around events, loyalty programs or disaster relief efforts, for example. SKUPay eliminates the need for coupons or other discount vehicles while keeping payment eligibility tied to select products.
In a disaster-relief situation, for example, merchants are approved to provide water, bread and milk to consumers. These items can be digitally loaded into the merchant’s POS system via SKUx, and consumers can instantly pay for only the “pre-approved” items via SKUPay’s technology.
Promote Item-Level Purchases
Similarly, if a retailer wants to promote private-label item purchases, a SKUPay promotion can be easily and quickly defined and digital tender cards can be delivered to consumers to purchase those items.
“When you check out, you have a basket of items. Currently, programs require the merchant to send that whole basket to a third party,” Berg noted. “SKUPay can enable basket eligibility without a third party getting access to the basket data.”
Changes to the Retail Landscape
Quick and easy payments that drive larger basket sizes, greater share of wallet and new store traffic, SKUPay can deliver on all these merchant “wants” quickly and easily. SKUx technology can be integrated seamlessly with most POS systems. Once implemented, SKUPay enables support for unlimited item lists and tender-based promotions.
This new technology can change the game for retail merchants that want a more streamlined approach and high customer engagement rates for targeted promotions and performance management.
“SKUPay opens a wide spectrum of opportunities for merchants to move products off the shelf, introduce new products or drive people to the store,” Berg said. “The sky’s the limit for implementing this technology to increase basket size and greater share of wallet, two of the biggest objectives merchants talk about.”
To view Guy Berg’s full presentation at the ASC X9 Webinar click here.
