3 Easy Ways Payment Providers Can Get Merchants Ready for Holiday Sales

The Holiday Shopping Opportunity

The holidays are unquestionably the most important time of year for retail merchants. Between the major holiday sales, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday (and the general shopping consumers do right through December), merchants need to be ready for increased demand and higher traffic. 

According to the National Retail Federation and U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 holiday sales grew 3.8% year-over-year to a record $964.4 billion dollars. Mastercard’s data had growth coming in slightly lower, but still healthy at 3.1% over the period from November 1st to December 24th. For ecommerce merchants, Adobe’s data showed that online sales alone brought in $222 billion in November and December 2023, and the company is forecasting the 2024 holiday season to be even higher, at $240.8 billion. 

The numbers make two things clear:

• First, your merchants can’t afford to take the holidays lightly, and squeezing the most out of November and December can often make or break their entire year 
• Second, the holiday shopping season is busy, and that means stress for merchants who are unprepared or unoptimized

In both cases, there is a lot you can do to help without putting any undue burden on your own team. For the best holiday season, merchants need to deliver a great customer experience — and payments are a huge part of that. The holidays are also an extremely stressful time for merchants, so having your team and expertise in their corner can go a long way towards minimizing headaches and ensuring sales go off without a hitch. 

Three Easy Ways To Help Your Merchants Prepare for the Holiday Season

A big boost in revenue means a big boost in residuals for payment providers. That means both you and your merchants stand to benefit from being ready for the holiday shopping season. With so much at stake, what can you do to help your merchants have a great holiday sales season?

Laying the right foundation involves some longer-term processes, like getting merchants set up with modern payment channels. But there are also simple, easy things you can do to help your merchants get through the holidays. 

Here are three high-value, low-difficulty ways you can set your merchants up for success during the last few weeks of the year, even at the last minute:

1) Make Sure Payment Systems are Up, Running and Redundant

One of the easiest (but most overlooked) ways you can ensure your merchants are set up for success is to make sure their existing payment systems are operating properly and ready for an influx of shoppers. 

In-store, double-check that merchant payment terminals and point-of-sale (POS) systems are all functioning and that there are enough of them. If payment hardware goes down during a big sale like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, merchants will have to deal with the headache of growing lines, frustrated customers and lost sales. 

One of the easiest ways to avoid a disaster like this is to have backup systems in place that merchants can easily swap in when a payment device goes down or a POS system malfunctions. For instance, merchants can use “Tap to Pay” on devices like tablets or smartphones to take contactless payments without a traditional, physical payment terminal. Features like this give merchants more flexibility and autonomy during busy shopping seasons, even if their only backup is a personal smartphone.

For ecommerce sellers, there’s no hardware to worry about and no foot traffic to clog up a store. However, digital traffic can still cause big problems if a merchant isn’t ready for it. In anticipation of more shoppers, encourage your online merchants to test their ecommerce software, load test their systems and ensure their web hosting is adequate enough to handle a spike in traffic.

2) Activate Available Features To Improve the Customer Experience

A lot more goes into a great holiday season than just payment processing. The value-added services that your payment partner offers can help your merchants create a great customer experience, minimize their stress and maximize their revenue. And, best of all, enabling those add-on services can often be done in minutes once a merchant has agreed to try them out. 

Two examples of value-added services that can make a big impact on your merchants this holiday season include:

• Secure, off-site payment data storage and tokenization: Services like NMI Customer Vault let merchants securely store customer payment data — a key part of offering subscription payments and the fast, Amazon-style one-click checkouts that today’s holiday shoppers expect
• Advanced fraud protection: False positives in fraud scanning can lead to unnecessary declines, lost sales and angry customers. Advanced fraud prevention services like Kount use artificial intelligence and cutting-edge fraud screening technology to minimize false positives, stopping real fraud in its tracks while maximizing revenue

These types of value-added services not only improve holiday sales for merchants and their end customers, but they also generate extra revenue for you. And, since many value-added services can be toggled on and off with ease, merchants can opt for a free trial to test them during the busy holiday season.

3) Prioritize Support Flows Before the Holidays

When things go wrong during the holidays, merchant stress levels go through the roof.  As a payment provider, you can help everyone involved — including your own team — by getting ahead of the potential rush of support requests from frantic merchants. With the right plan, you can give your team the tools needed to properly triage and resolve issues quickly.

To start, put together some educational materials or a communications campaign designed to remind your merchants of the fastest and most effective ways to engage support. That way, if something does go wrong during peak hours, merchants won’t waste their time (or yours) calling the wrong numbers, emailing the wrong people or sending you irrelevant information.

On your end, go through a similar process, reminding your support team of the best practices for handling requests during high-volume, high-pressure times. It’s also important to coordinate ahead of time with your payments partner to ensure the channels for any major support requests are open and well-defined.

Powering Holiday Sales Success

One of the best ways to help your merchants thrive during the holidays is by offering payment services and support powered by a great partner. At NMI, our full-service payment platform provides you with everything you need to make your merchants’ holiday season a success.

From our industry-leading gateway to a full line of traditional hardware and mobile solutions, we can power your merchants’ payments no matter how or where they sell. To find out more about how NMI can help you help your merchants this holiday season and beyond, reach out to a member of our team.