Unwrapping Holiday Revenue with Pagos

'Tis the season for more than just festive lights and holiday cheer—it's prime time for merchants like you to capitalize on the bustling world of seasonal shopping. As promotional periods extend and customer expectations rise, merchants face an opportunity for increased revenue alongside the challenges associated with processing a large volume of transactions. Here at Pagos, we know a bird or two who can help optimize your holiday processing strategy so your bottom line can soar higher than Santa’s reindeer. 

A Birds Eye View of Holiday Shopping

Let’s start with a quick review of some trends in holiday shopping—and payment processing—so you know what you’re up against.

In recent years, holiday shoppers interact with businesses more and more online instead of rushing to the mall. This surge in mobile and digital commerce means attracting and acquiring customers is a more competitive and expensive game than ever before. The real challenge comes when a customer is ready to make a purchase; if the checkout process takes too long or confuses buyers in any way, they’re going to take off faster for your competitors than you can say “Ho-Ho-Hold on a minute!” As such, we see the linchpin for customer trust and loyalty often comes down to a smooth and secure checkout process. This is true all times of the year, but especially important in the holiday season when the opportunity for delighting return customers or attracting new customers (and their associated lifetime value potential) is so high.

When transaction volume increases, so do the total costs associated with processing those transactions. You’ll encounter fees from card issuers, card brands, and processors, and if you’re not monitoring them closely, they can really stack up. Keeping an eagle eye on payment processor performance, customer payment method trends, and fraudulent activity are essential for keeping costs from cutting into your holiday profits.

At the end of every holiday shopping season comes a dreaded surge in returns and chargebacks. Gift recipients will inevitably come a-knocking with products to return or exchange; unsatisfied customers and those who suspect fraud (or are committing friendly fraud) will file disputes. You can prepare yourself for this time of year by keeping detailed records of customer transaction history and communications. Tracking return and chargeback data can also help you identify trends to keep in mind for future holiday surges!

Making the Most of the Holidays with Pagos

To navigate the challenges and opportunities associated with holiday shopping, merchants must adopt best practices for the season. Keeping an eagle eye on the stability and performance of payment processors, optimizing payment methods, and combating fraud are essential steps. Streamlining checkout processes, understanding costs, and staying prepared for refunds and chargebacks are equally critical.

Enter Pagos, offering a suite of products designed to be holiday allies for merchants of all sizes. Let’s take a look at exactly what our products can do for your business this time of year and beyond:

Monitor Key Metrics

Peacock by Pagos is our payments aggregation and visualization platform. You’ll import all your payments data into Peacock, and we’ll generate dashboards of charts and graphs demonstrating your comprehensive conversion, transaction, refund, chargeback, and cost data (and more!) over time. In Peacock, you’ll be able to monitor spikes in transaction volume throughout the holiday season, and break down that volume by variables such as payment method, processor, card issuer, and customer country. Here are just a few things you can do with this data over the holiday season:

• Track the impact of individual marketing campaigns, including changes in the number of transactions processed and the average order value

• Identify your customers’ preferred payment methods, while also monitoring the cost of accepting those payment methods

• Monitor approval rates across processors and customer segments to determine what changes you might want to make to your processor routing strategy

• Identify spikes in addressable declines so you can act immediately on setup issues or outages that might be costing you sales volume

Once you’ve identified the metrics that matter the most to your business around the holidays,  you can use Canary to monitor your data behind the scenes in real time. With Canary—our data monitoring and anomaly detection service—you can rest easy knowing we’ll keep an eye out for sudden unexpected changes in your data and let you know when there’s something to address. For all of our customers, that means catching more things faster, translating to even more revenue optimization.

The Turnover and Average Order Value chart appears on the Home dashboard in Peacock. Here you can monitor spikes in transaction volume around big holiday shopping days, such as Black Friday)

Learn more about Peacock
Learn more about Canary

Simplify and Secure Your Checkout

When a customer is ready to make some holiday purchases on your site, you want to make their checkout process as quick and easy as possible. To ensure this, you likely store customer payment methods in your vault, allowing repeat customers to make purchases with the push of a button. But when those stored payment credentials expire, are lost, stolen, or replaced, that push-button checkout experience comes to a screeching halt. 

Instead of asking your customers to dig in their wallets for a new payment method—or losing them altogether because they give up on the purchase—you can employ an account updater tool that keeps vaulted payment credentials updated with the card issuers’ systems without any action from you or your customers. With Loon by Pagos, you can access account updater services from all four major card brands (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Visa) through a single integration. Never again will a vaulted payment method expire and result in unnecessary declines!

Pagos also offers a global network tokenization tool known as Toucan. With Toucan, you can convert all the personal account numbers (PANs) in your vault into secure network tokens from all four card networks. Network tokens are not only fraud proof (if a bad actor tries to steal your data, they can’t process transactions with your business’s secure tokens), but they stay up to date even when their underlying card expires or is replaced. In addition, network tokens improve acceptance rates and often reduce your interchange cost in many markets. Interested in using Toucan and Loon together? Check out our blog post on the many benefits of employing both network tokenization and account updater.