Why you should be paying attention to AMPs when running a business

Consumers today demand an easy and seamless checkout experience. While it’s normal practice for merchants to accept card payments, they must now offer alternative payment methods (AMPs) to customers for a more versatile shopping experience.

With alternative payment methods, the main advantage merchants have is to grow their business in both local and global markets. By using AMPs, merchants can drastically reduce payment friction and are likely to reduce cart abandonment for their customers.

What are alternative payment methods?

Alternative methods of payment are a way to accept payments in other forms than cash. AMPs include payments that are made by using credit or debit cards, loyalty program points, cryptocurrencies, or virtual wallets such as Apple or Google Pay.

Some popular alternative payment methods in the MENA region include:

• PayPal
• Venmo
• TransferWise
• Stripe
• Dibsy

Lately, AMPs have grown in popularity because they allow consumers to pay for products or services with added security and ease. If you need your customers to register and create a new account to make a payment or complete long-winded forms, your payment solutions are outdated and inadequate. This is why more and more merchants, particularly in the online space, are optimizing their payment solutions to include AMPs.

Why are alternative payment methods important?

With cart abandonment rates averaging almost 75%, it’s understandable that you want to prevent customers from leaving your site last minute.

To remain competitive in the digital space, you need to take advantage of AMPs. If you don’t allow customers to pay how they want to, you’ll end up losing the business that you’ve worked so hard to attain.

AMPs have increased in popularity as more fintech companies enter the payment ecosystem. This year, it’s expected that AMPs will account for nearly 55% of global e-commerce transactions. Not only has this resulted in faster and more convenient ways for customers to make purchases, but also provides a way for merchants to access global markets and consumers.

Advantages to Alternative Payment Methods

If you’re a merchant in the MENA region, it would be wise to optimize your online and offline payment options. Here are five advantages you’ll get by incorporating AMPs into your business:

Boost your customer experience

Customers don’t want to spend minutes or carry out multiple steps to complete a checkout on your website. And you don’t want them to either.

If you have great UX for the rest of your website and haven’t given much thought about the UX for the most crucial aspect of business (sales), you’re going to miss out on huge benefits.

Ensuring that your customers have a seamless user experience in the last stage of the sales process is crucial. If your checkout experience takes more than 2 steps to complete, the chances of customers changing their mind and abandoning payment increase dramatically. Instead, you need to focus on creating a fast customer experience that will require little to no effort on your customers’ end and allows them to pay you how they want.

Gives more flexibility

As merchants, you might want to jump on multiple opportunities to have a customer complete a sale. That’s why you might want to adopt more than one AMP to offer flexible payment options to customers.

You can include some popular AMPs that are globally recognized, such as PayPal or Stripe. Or you might want to include some AMPs from local providers, based on your region.

Every region has its unique challenges and that’s most definitely the case for the MENA region. Because bank policies are more stringent, some AMPs cater particularly to merchants in MENA. This gives both you and your customers more flexibility to choose a payment solution provider that is local.

They build trust and are more secure

Payment processors, aggregators, and even alternative payment method providers must follow strict security protocols to ensure that customer data remains safe and protected.

Many companies also offer satisfaction guarantees so customers have peace of mind when checking out from online retailers and businesses. This allows them to complete a transaction quickly, without compromising their identities or banking information. It also protects them from faulty transactions or illegitimate businesses.

Fewer chargebacks

Chargebacks cost businesses a lot of money and loss of income. Companies that accumulate too many chargebacks find themselves unable to yield processing rates in the future. Alternative payment solutions from debit, credit, or bank accounts can help businesses reduce these risks, making AMPS ideal for anyone who needs to safeguard from unwarranted chargebacks.

Dibsy: An Alternative Payment Method for merchants in MENA

Dibsy provides alternative payment methods for online merchants in the MENA region. We make it easy for merchants to conduct their business. Merchants can accept payments for online stores, websites, mobile applications, and services. You can choose which payment options are the best for you and your customers and enable them.

With Dibsy, you will acquire security, and ability to work with high-risk industries, and low fees. Many payment tools and types of payments, withdrawal of the funds to any country using a preferred method and much more are also awaiting you.

You can find out more about the features of Dibsy and how it can help you optimize your business processes on the official website.