As the lines between on- and offline life continue to blur, the advantages of delivering a unified shopping experience have become evident to consumers and merchants alike.
The convenience of click-and-collect or curbside pickups cater to goal-oriented customers, while brick-and-mortar experiences are still available to those that want a more immersive experience.
By providing end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights, and financial products in a single global solution, Adyen helps businesses achieve their ambitions faster.
Fintech.ca sat down with the Amsterdam-based unicorn’s Country Manager for Canada, Sander Meijers, to learn how Adyen is driving innovation in unified commerce in Canada.
What is Adyen?
SM: Adyen is the financial technology platform of choice for leading companies. With offices around the world, Adyen has grown to support major brands including Lightspeed, Bouclair, Moose Knuckles, and more. Adyen is fuelling the future of the booming “unified commerce” industry by delivering frictionless payments across online, mobile, and in-store channels. Through our financial technology platform, we deliver innovative solutions that transform the way the world pays.
What value do you add to retailers through your technology?
SM: Providing retailers with end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights, and financial products in a single solution, Adyen helps businesses achieve their ambitions faster. We are helping brands combine the world of online shopping and in-person shopping into one, easy, and seamless experience for shoppers. That experience is called unified commerce, and we believe that it will shape the future of the retail experience as it opens a world of new and engaging consumer experiences.
Next to local presence in Canada, Adyen’s single solution has global presence, by providing local payment methods that the local shoppers like to use per region.
What does the future of payments technology look like in Canada?
SM: Adyen started by revolutionizing the way payments have been done historically. It used to be patchwork – you had a brick-and-mortar team and a digital team, with no synergy between the two – whereas now we make it one platform to seamlessly support payments both online and offline, and it doesn’t matter which region. Adyen’s payment technology allows you to go one step further, providing a single platform to accept payments, protect revenue, and control your finances.
The Canadian payments technology space is currently facing two roadblocks to innovation – legacy, and outages.Those things are easily solvable by getting better, more modern platforms in place. First and foremost, the Canadian payments technology industry needs to modernize technology. A lot of e-commerce systems are completely separated from in-store systems. Companies have built in-store teams, and once they got websites, they had to start all over and begin from scratch. Shoppers feel it, especially if they’re a loyal in-person customer and when they go online and they aren’t recognized. With the combined system that Adyen provides, companies can bridge that gap.
What do Canadians want when they shop with retailers?
SM: This summer, we released Adyen’s first Canada Retail Report, and its findings prove that unified commerce is here to stay. The report found that 67% of Canadian customers in 2022 prefer to shop in-store, in contrast to the 82% of online shoppers in 2020. The report also found that 50% of shoppers look for an experience beyond just the product.
We also saw that there is a need for customer loyalty programs. 56% of customers would be more likely to use a retailer’s loyalty program if it automatically linked with their payment card. Additionally, 60% of consumers would be more loyal to a retailer if they could return their online items in store. It is clear that Canadian shoppers appreciate when retailers pick up on their shopping habits and leverage that in future purchases. In fact, over one third of Canadian customers prefer retailers who use previous shopping behaviour to serve personalized suggestions and create a more tailored shopping experience.
I’ve seen the term unified commerce come up more and more lately. What does unified commerce mean to you?
SM: A recent survey found seven-in-ten (67%) Canadians are shopping less in stores nowadays than before the pandemic began back in March 2020. Yet, if given a choice between shopping in a brick-and-mortar store or online, two-thirds (65%) of Canadian consumers prefer to wander the aisles and purchase items off the shelf.
What does this struggle between in-person and online shopping mean for Canadian merchants? The conflicting preferences of today’s consumer indicates that retailers need to double down on unified commerce solutions in order to create an integrated shopping experience that not only keeps consumers coming back, but also keeps up with the shifting demands of Canada’s retail landscape.
That is exactly what we are doing at Adyen – shaping the emerging “unified commerce” industry in Canada. Adyen creates a seamless customer experience both online and in-store through their all-encompassing payment solutions not seen yet in the Canadian market.
What excites you about the future of innovation and technology within the payments space?
SM: In one word, what excites me about the future of innovation and technology is opportunity. I know that Canada is just getting started! We’ve been working with brands like this to bring their customer experience to new levels. Combining the two worlds of in-store and online payments is just the beginning.
If you are a retail brand with ambitions, just know that nothing can stop you. With the use of better technology, you can go as far as you’d like to deliver exceptional experiences to your customers.
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