4 tips to grow your eCommerce business

The positive news is that our quarterly research shows mid-sized businesses have proven themselves resilient through the coronavirus period and optimism is tentatively returning. Our index score measuring overall positivity across a range of factors, including the sales pipeline, planned investment, finance raising, and business prospects, is higher among mid-sized businesses (£10m–£25m turnover) than with small or micro businesses.

But to convert this optimism into business growth, leveraging and maximising eCommerce channels will be key. Here are four tips focused on the critical areas to think about.

1. Become fully customer-centric – This means thinking about the entire customer experience through their end-to-end journey in doing business with you. Can you recognise a customer so that they don’t have to enter their details every time they buy from you? Are you alerting them with relevant and tailored offers? Can you create a view of the customer’s preferences and habits from the transaction history you hold?
   
   “To help retailers plan, we’re able to overlay consumer opinion, sentiment and spend behaviour, and the way shoppers are thinking about their finances, to customer data. And we can break that data down in many ways, including regionally, to see how shoppers are behaving depending on where they are in the UK.”
   
   Kirsty Morris, Managing Director of Account Development, Barclaycard Business
   
   
2. Provide a multi-channel environment – With the increasing movement online and to mobile/digital apps, you need to reflect this multi-channel, multi-touchpoint environment. Physical outlets, as well as mail order/telephone order (MOTO), remain important and part of the mix, but it’s crucial that customers can interact with you online too. Systems can be linked up so that customers don’t have to re-enter information on each channel. Accounts should update based on their history with you. That way, you can build in more personalisation and loyalty offers – something that customers increasingly expect. It’s about making everything as seamless, easy and personalised for the customer as possible.
   
   
3. Power change through payments - Clunky payment systems deter customers: research shows that 58% of customers will stop a purchase altogether if the checkout process is complicated³. You need quick, effective payment systems that are safe, secure and reliable, that can cope with alternative payment methods too (which are growing all the time). That’s why we’ve launched Smartpay Fuse, a new payments system that easily integrates with your services to create a smooth customer experience.
   
   
4. Make security a top priority – Security should be a prime concern for any business, as it is for customers. There are many current and upcoming regulatory standards that systems must comply with, including the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)* and 3-D Secure. Our Smartpay Fuse gateway is fully compliant with all of these, incorporating sophisticated encryption and tokenisation (converting customer card numbers to ‘tokens’ for extra security). You can have peace of mind knowing that Barclaycard Business works hard to keep the service regularly updated to meet the highest security standards and evolve to meet any new regulatory requirements.
   

^{3 PPRO, April 2020
*The EEA (European Economic Area) SCA deadline is 31 December 2020 and the UK SCA deadline is 14 September 2021.}