NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – As retailers and payments services providers increasingly try to connect and track consumer transactions across online and in-store channels, mobile payments must function as part of an omnichannel payments ecosystem, say industry observers.
Mobile wallet users also interact with merchants as online customers and as traditional card payments customers, and merchants, along with payments services and mobile-wallet providers stand to benefit from connecting those customer experiences smoothly, say observers.
Offering a more seamless transition between payments channels–and merchants–will likely help merchants compete for consumer attention and purchases. And gathering data across multiple channels will give merchants an opportunity to do better target marketing and provide more meaningful offers. But merchants and payments and wallet providers face challenges both in connecting different commerce channels and in figuring out who owns consumer data and what to do with it.
