Research from Paysafe has revealed that most Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the US believe enhanced growth comes with providing customers with a seamless checkout experience.
Amongst the 200 SMBs surveyd, 80% view a seamless customer checkout journey as “critical” for their business to grow this year, with 70% also prioritising the need to integrate new payment technologies to further enhance the customer experience.
During the pandemic, many businesses transformed their operations by moving more digitally into ecommerce. Paysafe reveals that 73% of SMBs already had an online presence, with 62% agreeing that an online presence is vital for their business to thrive.
The research outlined that US businesses are “optimistic” about the 2023 outlook, with 56% of surveyed SMBs hoping for a year “better than 2022” with a small 9% portion fearing 2023 could be worse than the previous year.
SMBs stressed that they would like to improve the customer experience, with a frictionless checkout journey being one of the main priorities, with 69% of SMBs focusing on reducing the time their customers spend at the checkout.
The businesses also confirmed the importance of payments and the checkout experience for their overall strategy. 86% agree that this is important in terms of retaining existing customers and 82% for attracting new customers.
Furthermore, 79% consider payments and the checkout key for managing expenses, 79% for reducing costs, 76% for competitive differentiation, and 68% for entering new markets.
Merchants indicated an interest in new payments technology. Fixed terminal card readers proved to still be the most popular type of payment equipment currently present at in-store checkouts (65%), as many merchants are looking to implement more modern systems within the next two years.
“We were happy to see that most merchants are optimistic about the year ahead and that they appreciate the contribution that payments can make to the overall customer experience and ultimately as a key differentiator for their businesses’ growth,” commented Afshin Yazdian, President of Merchant Solutions at Paysafe.
