These days, businesses need every advantage to gain an edge over their competitors. However, many eCommerce brands shoot themselves in the proverbial foot by not offering local payments, which is an easy way to build customer loyalty and create more conversions.
Local payment methods, put simply, are payment options that are locally popular or only available in certain regions or countries. Such solutions usually cater to the specific needs of customers in a region, so they can be somewhat different from the more generalized, interconnected payment methods used around the world.
Local payment methods can include:
- E-wallets, which can be used to surf the out currencies and cryptocurrencies. Examples include AliPay (China), M-Pesa (Kenya), Mobile Pay (the Nordics)
- Payment gateways such as iDeal in the Netherlands, or Interac in Canada, facilitating safer bank transfers.
- BNPL agreements, which allow customers to pay for an expensive purchase over several payments instead of all at once
- Cash on delivery, exemplified by Splitit, which is enabled for AliExpress customers in Spain, France, and Germany
- Invoices, which are, of course, used when someone buys a product or service and a merchant since an invoice requesting payment within 14 to 30 days.
If you don’t use local payments, however, your brand could face several big risks and disadvantages. Let’s take a closer look.
Missed Business Opportunities
For starters, if you don’t offer local payments to your customers, you’ll be missing out on business opportunities. Customers won’t be as able to spend money at your business, due to local limitations or personal preferences. It doesn’t matter what you offer or how good your marketing is if you don’t let your customers spend their money easily on your eCommerce website.
Don’t believe us? According to Statista, mobile wallets accounted for half of global eCommerce payment transactions in 2022 alone. That’s set to increase significantly over the next few years. Simply put, if you only offer generalized, global options, customers might just go to a competitor to use other payment methods that are more accessible to them.
Customer Trust and Convenience
In addition, not offering local payments can cost you dearly in terms of customer trust and convenience. The easier you make it to spend money, the more satisfied customers will feel with your overall business services, brand, and customer service.
Put another way, if you offer your customers several local ways to pay, in addition to more widespread or general options, they will find it extremely easy and convenient to use your eCommerce website. That can be a huge benefit when you are trying to cultivate customer satisfaction and loyalty, particularly in the earliest days of your business’s lifespan.
The more customer trust you can cultivate early on, the easier it will be to keep that customer trust for the long haul, particularly as your business becomes more sophisticated, offers more products, and becomes more valuable. Those initial site visitors will convert into paying customers for years to come!
Currency Conversion Costs
Global currencies all have different conversion rates. For example, the U.S. dollar can be more or less compared to a single euro depending on the overall economy, the time of year, and other factors.
If you don’t offer local payments, your customers might face extra fees when they convert their local currencies into global currencies, like the U.S. dollar. In other words, your customers will pay more for your products and services, which can leave a negative impression on them. As a business owner, you want to make things easier for your customers, not harder.
On top of that, when you offer many alternative payment methods, and not just PayPal or Visa, you can accept currencies from customers in niche or isolated markets while retaining the full value of their original currencies. Then, you can hold onto those currencies until a favorable exchange rate comes up.
Compliance and Legal Issues
Depending on your region or business niche, it might be legally required for you to offer local payments to your customers. That’s because processing cross-border payments comes with a lot of red tape and possible hurdles for your brand to overcome.
For example, when you do business in the E.U., you need to abide by the GDPR legislation regarding customer transactions and online privacy. It’ll be easier for your brand to do that if you accept, for example, online wallet transactions from European customers. In contrast, it’ll be harder to abide by the GDPR’s regulations if you only accept PayPal transactions in U.S. dollars.
In the long run, it’s well worth it in terms of time and money to offer local payments to your worldwide customers. It’ll just be easier for you to ensure your brand stays compliant and in the good graces of regulatory agencies.
Competitive Disadvantage
More broadly, not offering local payments to your customer base could put you at a significant competitive disadvantage relative to other businesses in the same niche.
Roofing professionals who operate in a hyper-localized market are a perfect example of this. Nowadays, home services contractors can only expect peak performance if they’re integrating local payment methods into their digital dashboards. This results in better operational efficiency, higher revenues, and a more pleasant user experience.
Therefore, any company or contracting organization will cease to exist sooner or later if it doesn’t cater to the desires of its local customer base. Odds are you need to do the same, whether that’s a very localized customer base or an international customer base with buyers from around the world.
Bottom line: you don’t want to not offer local payment options to your customers if your competitors already do so. You’ll just look like the less-than-stellar alternative.
Reputation and Brand Image
Believe it or not, your brand’s reputation and overall image can be impacted by whether or not you offer local payments to your target audience members. If you offer lots of payment methods, and it’s generally easy for customers to spend money on your online store, you’ll cultivate a much better, friendlier reputation.
In the long run, this can act as a form of passive marketing. Your customers will spread the word about your brand and its virtues far and wide, and you might see more visitors to your eCommerce store in no time.
Steps to Implement Local Payment Options
To start offering local payment options, it’s a wise idea to take a few smart steps right at the start:
- Firstly, do lots of market research so you can identify exactly what local payment method your customers use and prefer. That way, you offer what’s most convenient and popular for your target audience members
- Next, use effective, user-friendly payment processors like 2Checkout to integrate many new payment options into your existing eCommerce site.
- Lastly, be sure to do some test runs of different payments or purchases on your site before launching new payment options for everyone. That way, you can make sure the new payment options work like a charm before advertising your new accessibility
Conclusion
Ultimately, the importance of offering local payment options in the ever-evolving world of eCommerce cannot be overstated. Failure to do so can result in missed business opportunities, as customers seek out more accessible payment methods.
To implement local payment options successfully, thorough market research, user-friendly payment processors, and rigorous testing are essential steps. Embracing these strategies will not only enhance your eCommerce business but also position it for sustained success in the global marketplace.
That’s doubly true when you use comprehensive, intuitive tools like 2Checkout which allows you to sell software and SaaS products online to a variety of customers easier than ever. Check it out today!
