Must Read: Here's how payment analytics can unlock growth for your business

According to Statista, 2.14 billion people across the world bought goods and services online in the year 2021. Compared to the 1.66 billion online buyers in 2016, this number shows a rising trend in online spending.

The growth of e-commerce, a greater number of payment channels, widespread use of smartphones, and accessibility to high-speed internet are a few reasons for the rising number of digital buyers.

For digital businesses, data is one of, if not the most, valuable resources.

Enter payment analytics!

It is a feature that comes in handy for merchants looking to make better business decisions by leveraging a pool of transactional data. The process collects and analyses data to provide insights into customer spending behaviour, payment trends, fraud, and much more. By tracking data from multiple channels, the process ultimately helps to understand customer payment trends, and identify gaps in order to bridge them for growing the business. But analysing data is not enough.

Payment analytics must factor in the following parameters to derive meaningful insights:

1. Different payment sources: Understanding which is the most and least used payment source for your customers can help devise sales strategies. Monitoring this data in real-time will provide insights into customer behaviour, and can help take immediate action in case any unusual spending patterns are observed.

2. Reasons for payment failure: By analysing the various reasons for payment failure, businesses can set themselves up for success. Troubleshooting problems before they arise ensures that customers get a streamlined, hassle-free payment experience. The analytics may also provide recommendations on how to tackle the top reasons for failure, thereby, making customer retention much easier.

3. New/repeat and churn customers: A reliable analytics process provides information about the number of new, repeat and churn customers in a given duration. While a high number of engaged, repeat customers provides motivation, a high number of churn customers may advise for better marketing efforts or even a complete strategy overhaul.

4. Benchmarking your performance: By providing data on the historical trend of success rates vis-à-vis the number of transactions and the transaction amounts, merchants will be able to track their performance and compare it with that of the industry. Thus, whether to make changes or continue with the existing strategy becomes a quick and easy decision.

5. Success rates: Payment analytics provides data on the performance at both the channel (app vs website) as well as platform (Android vs iOS) levels. This helps target the improvement areas to have higher conversion rates and increased customer engagement. By understanding which app version and device type are performing the best, organizations can ascertain their ROI from different channels, and make better decisions.

6. User retention: Having quantifiable data on customer retention for the selected period will specifically help the growth and marketing teams. The insights will tell the impact of the marketing initiatives and the areas of improvement.

7. Customer drop analysis: An RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis gives a clear representation of the number and percentage of customers the business is at risk of losing, customers it has already lost, loyal customers, etc. Merchants can also track which checkout option is the most used by their customers, and accordingly make business decisions.

Customization, ease of payment, security, integration, a seamless payment experience, and good customer support are generally hallmarks of a good payment gateway option.

However, payment analytics is an important element missing in most payment gateways. Paytm has integrated all the aforementioned parameters into its payment gateway to aid businesses in significantly upgrading their payment ecosystem.

By utilizing both historical and real-time data, payment analytics optimizes the payment journey, and provides precious data to merchants. Hence, it’s time merchants integrate and adopt payment analytics into their operations.

For more information on payment analytics, visit their website.

(This article is generated and published by the Insider Studios team. You can get in touch with them on insiderstudios@businessinsider.in )