Back to articles
Growth is the target for all businesses — attracting more customers, developing revenue streams, and reaching an increasing number of markets and demographics. But this growth can be elusive. Adopting new strategies and technologies can be expensive and may require a significant overhaul of operations, and business owners may be unsure of how they can achieve growth without the downtime, cost, and disruption.
Sometimes, however, the answer is simple. With web payment systems, you can revolutionize the way you handle and process incoming and outgoing payments, making life easier for your customers and clients, as well as for your staff. What's more, API technology and legacy system integration can make implementation seamless, reducing downtime and saving your business money in the process.
Read on to learn more about how the right web payment system can help you target and achieve real business growth.
Enhancing the customer experience
Convenience is a major driver for customers, and businesses need to make sure they are meeting this need. Research published by NASDAQ in 2020 found that 97% of consumers had abandoned a purchase because paying for the item was inconvenient, while more than 90% said convenience was a key factor when choosing a retailer. Perhaps most significantly, the research found that 83% of consumers said that retail convenience was more important in 2020 than it had been five years previously. The need for convenience is growing.
And this trend still appears to be the case. The NICE 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report found that consumers are displaying an increased desire for self-service options in retail. According to the report, 81% of customers stated they wanted to see more self-service options, while 95% of businesses said they had seen an uptick in self-service requests.
Across all areas of business, digital technology is developing and accelerating, and this means user expectations are developing and accelerating at the same time. Whether you operate in a B2C market, accepting and managing digital payments from consumers, or you are more B2B focused, the facts are largely the same — you need to be providing high levels of convenience for your customers and clients.
Reliable web payment systems are ideal for achieving this kind of convenience. It's not just about accepting payments from your clients — although this is a big part of fostering business growth and increasing revenue. Instead, it's about delivering a painless customer experience across every interaction. By processing reimbursements online, or by delivering gift cards, reward redemptions, and other payouts, your business puts your customers in the driving seat. Essentially, a web payment system introduces a self-service element across more of your customer interactions. As we've seen from the statistics above, this is what modern customers are looking for.
Globalizing your outlooks
There are many factors that contribute to business growth, but scope is an important one. While you can increase the full lifetime value of each of your clients via customer retention strategies and providing new product and service offerings, this is limited if you are working with a finite client pool. Expanding your scope beyond national borders in a sustainable and manageable way helps you extend your reach and grow your potential revenue effectively.
A web payment system leverages digital technology to provide access to clients and customers around the world. These users will be able to make swift payments directly to your business, acquiring products and services across all your areas of operation. For digital and remote-focused businesses, this can offer huge advantages — when products and services are delivered digitally, there are fewer barriers to international trade, which means you need a global web payment solution to help customers connect with your offerings, wherever they are.
Implementing this kind of web payment system also supports other transactions on a global scale. Reward payments, gift cards, foreign exchange transfers, and other transactions are all part of fostering lasting relationships with your most valuable customers. This in turn enhances their full lifetime value, supporting increased revenue growth by retaining these key clients. Web payment systems support quick and efficient transactions for customers in other countries, making global client retention much more straightforward.
Together, these two aspects take care of both sides of business growth. On the one hand, you'll be able to reach more consumers across the world, enabling them to make purchases wherever they are based. On the other, you'll be able to support and keep clients you bring in and those you already have, increasing the rate of conversion and the rate of retention at the same time.
Streamlining operations for your personnel
It's important to consider your personnel when you target business growth. As your business grows, the burden on your staff can grow too. Increasing transaction volumes, and the growing complexity of incoming and outgoing payments, can put human teams under a great deal of strain and can lead to bottlenecks further down the line. Payments and transactions need to be properly recorded and processed — if you are relying on human input to handle this, or manual data processing via Excel spreadsheets or other outdated solutions, the efficiency and morale of your teams are going to suffer. You could also find that these approaches lead to errors, putting your business accounts and regulatory compliance at risk.
Web payment systems offer a far more convenient and efficient means of recording and processing. These systems can integrate directly with dedicated pieces of software and digital platforms, such as customer relationship management solutions, enterprise resource planning platforms, and accountancy software. This means data is transferred automatically and securely in real time, eliminating the strain on your human personnel, as well as any potential for error.
Data input and direct analysis tasks are not suitable for human teams. Your human personnel is far better suited to creative and critical tasks, such as product development and operational strategy. By automating data transfer and processing via a web payments solution, you can optimize the way you use your teams, giving them more time to focus on tasks better suited to their skill sets.
Indirectly, this means you can bring products to market more quickly and increase your business revenue by exploring new opportunities. At the same time, you'll find that your workplace morale improves significantly, making it easier for your business to keep hold of valuable members of staff. It's far better to retain existing employees than to train and onboard new ones, and this is another factor that will support the growth of your business.
Achieving a digitally focused approach
Digital transformation is quickly becoming a major priority for businesses across a range of sectors. As of 2021, around 70% of businesses stated they had a digital transformation strategy in place already or that they were already developing one in some way. At this point, global spending on digital transformation was US$1.5 trillion — by 2026, this is expected to surpass US$3.4 trillion To put it simply, pivoting towards digitized operations is high on the agenda for businesses, and they are spending a lot of money in making this happen.
As the global marketplace becomes increasingly focused on the power of digital technology, this kind of transformation is a must for businesses. However, the cost and disruption of the change can be massive, and businesses are understandably concerned about this. This is where web payment systems can make a real difference, providing businesses with the advantages of digital transformation, without exposing them to excessive expense and operational downtime.
Thanks to API technology, implementing web payment solutions is swift and easy. Businesses can continue collecting payments and delivering rewards using legacy systems while they install their new, digitally focused solutions. This essentially means a seamless transition to a new way of handling and processing payments and transactions.
Integrations with existing software systems also make it easy to keep on top of transaction data, assisting businesses as they get to know more about customer and client preferences. The data provided by web payment systems supports targeted marketing and helps businesses fulfill the needs and expectations of clients more effectively, both of which contribute to business growth.
Moving ahead of your competitors
The above points give you a true competitive advantage in your market. By improving the convenience of your payment and transaction structures, you'll gain a reputation for efficiency and reliability in your market. This is a key benefit for customers and clients, whether they are approaching your eCommerce store as a consumer or they are signing up for a B2B subscription service as a long-term user.
By globalizing your outlook, and by processing and accepting payments from across the world, you are reaching markets that your competition may not have access to. This means you can diversify your revenue streams in a way that competitor organizations can't, and you may even be able to build a dominant position in previously untapped markets. As businesses become increasingly focused on global partnerships and cross-border services, this could see you gain a valuable head start as you expand your scope and reach.
We've already touched on the fact that it is more cost-effective to retain your key human assets rather than train new ones. However, you will still need a strong hiring strategy as you grow your business. Providing a better working environment for your personnel can make this happen. As you develop a reputation for nurturing a great place to work, with operational practices that support creativity and critical thinking from your staff, you will attract talent away from other organizations. When you need to bring in highly sought-after talent from your industry's candidate pool, they will be more likely to choose your business over others.
Finally — digital transformation. For businesses in most sectors, digital transformation is not really a choice; it's a necessity. The majority of businesses will need to make the shift toward digitally focused processes and operations; it's just a matter of when they choose to make these changes and how quickly they can accomplish them.
Web payment systems represent a major stepping stone on the road to full digital transformation — secure integrations make data transfer and processing automatic and swift, while API technology enables the embedding of payment services into web apps and other forms of application. This means your business can outpace your competitors as you adopt the digital focus you need, while minimizing disruption to your operations in the process.
Choose Runa as your web payments partner
Runa's solutions represent the ideal web payment systems for organizations targeting sustainable business growth. These systems are designed by global payments experts, applying their experience in value delivery and digital integration as they craft solutions designed to grow revenue and streamline the experience for all users.
Runa’s API enables the embedding of payment services into web apps, web pages, and other digital assets. This means users can access payment tools in a convenient and intuitive way whenever they interact with your business online. The API also supports a wide range of different types of payments, from credit and debit cards to cryptocurrencies, diversifying the options you provide to your customers and clients. Transform digital value into reward cards, credit payments, and disbursements via Runa's web payments platform. Handle all of this on an international scale, with foreign exchange conversion handled via the Runa API.
These are just some of the advantages you can expect when you choose Runa as your web payments partner. We work with some of the biggest brands and enterprises across the world, and we are perfectly positioned to help businesses of all sizes target real, sustainable business growth in the long term. To discover more about Runa and about what we can help you achieve, reach out to one of our experts. We can schedule a one-on-one demo that will help you experience the benefits of our solution for yourself.
