DH2i: Mobile Payments May Not Be Black Friday’s Big Problem This Year

With the arrival of November comes the inevitable considerations of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These two major shopping days bring with them a host of issues for businesses. Mobile payments have been playing a part in the shopping holidays for some time now, but a new report sent our way from DH2i suggests that mobile payments may not be the real problem in this round of Black Friday shopping.

DH2i’s co-founder and CEO, Don Boxley, put the pen to paper for this one, revealing that customers no longer based their buying decisions mainly on brand loyalty or price. These were still factors, certainly, but the leading factor was now customer experience, or the overall quality of the journey from hearing about a product to any after-sales issues that emerged.

However, Boxley raised a point that will be familiar to all mobile payments users. The means to judge customer experience these days—especially when it comes to online or mobile shopping—is “system availability and data security.” Customers want the option to shop from anywhere at any time, and expect as a matter of course that their payment data, including mobile payments use, will be safe in the process.

The risks of failing, meanwhile, go beyond unhappy customers. Boxley raised the specter of customer acquisition costs, as well as the costs of a data breach, to underscore how vital making a properly-secured customer experience really is when it comes to online shopping, especially ahead of Black Friday.

Security has long been the bane of the mobile payments world. It’s kept a lot of potential users sidelined and left the industry as sort of an also-ran alongside cash and credit cards, particularly in the US, where such tools live in an established class for years. While the addition of integrated rewards programs helped, and some stores are enjoying the benefits of mobile payments much more than others, the end result remains: mobile payments are still lagging the field.

While improving security will likely help, it will only be a gradual process that gets more users into the fold. Cash and credit cards are familiar tools, and breaking that entropy will require a very clear value proposition that makes users want to put an alternative to use.