How Digital Businesses Can Unlock Growth During the COVID-19 Global Lockdown

With the global COVID-19 Pandemic impacting every industry, innovative ecommerce leaders are looking for ways to grow while meeting consumers’ rapidly changing needs. Many digital content and digital subscription companies are seeing a global increase in demand and are eyeing opportunities that arise from an accelerating migration toward online sales and card-not-present transactions. 

Online education, video and music streaming, health and wellness apps, gaming, and software as a service companies are just a few of the businesses that can benefit from localizing their online experiences.

Make Payments Part of Your Localization Strategy

Most ecommerce companies’ localization strategies include languages, currencies, phone numbers, delivery and customer service. To reach new customers and new markets effectively, localized payments must be part of your strategy too. 

How do You Meet Demand for Local Payment Preferences?

Research shows a growing trend toward local payment methods dominating global markets¹. For example, In Germany, there is a strong preference for invoicing for online payments. Across Southeast Asia, ewallets and super apps dominate the payment landscape. In Brazil, installments are a popular way to make online purchases, but to offer them as an option, merchants need to work with a local payment processor. 

Many online subscription services use “pull” payment methods like credit cards that don’t require the purchaser to manually push funds to you for subscription and recurring purchases. But in much of the world, including Asia ad Latin America, push methods such as ewallets and bank redirects are preferred. These methods tend to drive adoption and should be embraced when entering relevant markets. In fact, 70% of consumers prefer to complete purchases if they are displayed in their native language and offer their preferred payment methods². 

Rapyd’s Country Guides provide detailed consumer payment preference data for individual countries. They are a great place to start when looking to localize payment methods.

Rapyd Country Guides

Latin America Country Profile eBook

European Country Profile eBook

Create Frictionless Customer Experiences

According to Accenture, “as the payments universe expands, customer experience is becoming the prime competitive differentiator.” Fintech as a Service solutions enable payments to be embedded easily into any application or checkout experience. APIs let your business offer seamless localized payment experiences, lowering the barriers to making purchases and increasing purchase frequency. 

Consider Compliance

Trying to understand and implement every country’s regulations and requirements around data security, fraud monitoring and reporting makes it impossible to scale. The simplest option available to any merchant is to work with payment platforms that already have country-specific compliance built into their services. This should be one of the key questions you ask when evaluating payment vendors. 

With the Right Payments and the Right Localized Site Experiences, the World Is Still Open for Business

There are over 4 billion consumers who don’t use credit cards and 2 billion without bank accounts³. By proactively localizing payments now, you’ll be in a strong position to meet growing demand and position your business to be among the winners emerging from the current global crisis. 

Download Going Global, Rapyd’s Guide to the Fastest Growing Payment Methods of 2020 and discover insights to power your global growth.

Sources:

1) McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/Global%20payments%20Expansive%20growth%20targeted%20opportunities/Global-payments-map-2018.ashx 

2) Digital Commerce 360, https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/03/10/how-to-localize-your-digital-business-for-global-commerce/ 

3) World Bank – Global Financial Inclusion, 2017