Customers and Businesses on Mobile Payments: A Continuing Disconnect

There’s little doubt that mobile payments have made some truly aggressive strides over the last few years, and new options are coming out regularly in terms of what customers can and can’t do. Yet despite this, there’s still quite a bit of disconnect between what the customer expects and what businesses are actually willing—or able—to provide, according to new word from Paysafe.

Paysafe—from its “Lost in Transaction” report—notes that the big problem seems to be on the merchant’s end; customers are increasingly finding the security of digital transactions lacking, which in turn often keeps them from pulling the trigger on purchases.

Customers found that mobile wallets are more convenient than cash in 83 percent of cases, based on the study, and 79 percent found the mobile wallet more convenient than contactless payments also. Sixty-seven percent of customers have abandoned a shopping cart online in the last month, owing in large part to tedious transactions.

While 71 percent of businesses consider fraud a serious problem, 36 percent of businesses are terrified that introducing more security would end up in abandoned carts and customers departing, mostly because transactions have suddenly become too tedious and complex.

Worse, there’s evidence that customers themselves are contributing to the problem by jumping at fraud shadows: almost half—49 percent—believe that fraud is inevitable in online shopping, and 81 percent of customers plain old won’t make a transaction over an insecure or public Wi-Fi signal. Surprisingly, 56 percent of customers claim to be willing to accept any measure to eliminate fraud.

So basically, customers expect a simple, easy-to-use, and perfectly safe mobile shopping experience, and are willing to punish businesses that don’t provide it by voting with their collective wallet and shopping elsewhere. But such a system technically can’t exist; the more secure it gets, the closer we get to the “room-with-no-doors” scenario of security, a theoretical system so secure that it’s useless. However, businesses can work toward offering “more security,” and promoting these systems accordingly as part of marketing efforts.

If so many customers expect fraud, perhaps businesses would be better served in telling customers how they protect those customers in the event of fraud. That might really be all customers need to hear to be happy enough with security that’s in place.