New Study Provides Insights on the Connected Customer

April 22, 2015 – Global management and strategy consulting firm Strategy&, together with ETA, recently released an in-depth study on the future of commerce based on a survey of over 1,000 consumers, 27 merchants and more than 50 payments executives.

Study findings include that on-line shopping is near ubiquitous, at 90% of surveyed consumers, with 40% utilizing mobile devices to shop. The report found that consumers who shop through mobile devices are looking for a broader set of shopping tools including alerts, personalized deals, price comparisons, and pay-as-you-go checkout.

Other key findings include:

  • Merchants desire value-added services from ETA members including analytics and insights on payments data and benchmarking services, and are additionally looking to ETA members to address pain points around stored payments credentials, a function described as vital by merchants surveyed.
  • Security remains a central concern, with just under 60% of respondents in all categories stating that if they learned that their credit or debit card information may have been compromised in a retailer security breach that they would cancel the potentially compromised card and roughly 20% reporting that they would stop shopping with the retailer where the data compromise happened.
  • Merchants largely reported readiness for the approaching move to EMV payments, with 70% saying they are prepared for the liability shift. However, the size of the merchant continues to matter. Large retailers seem to understand that if they fail to upgrade they will risk increasing fraud costs, while smaller retailers with few locations said they might choose to skip upgrade requirements due to their perception of minimal existing fraud costs.

The study, entitled Serving the Connected Customer of the Future, can be accessed by ETA members by contacting Melinda Gray, [email protected].