In the past, businesses, particularly smaller ones, were limited to their immediate environments to seek out customers. Now, with the dawn of the internet, this has changed and customers and business owners are no longer limited to their locality. Customers can buy from businesses outside their countries or even continents and businesses can sell in the same manner. The global rise of e-commerce has led to a decline in brick-and-mortar stores and everyone seems to be shopping online.
But with this interconnectivity comes the challenge of paying for goods and services. After all, customers from different parts of the world favor different online payment methods, and merchants are tasked with facilitating multiple payment methods lest they lose out on a global audience.
The Rocky Road of Making Payments
With the amount of commerce that takes place across the internet each day, payment gateways have become an important part of the financial world as well as a requirement for consumers. Most of us use PayPal or ApplePay or some other form of digital payment option and when we are buying online, we expect to be able to pay with them with ease.
For the average consumer, putting items into a cart and getting to the checkout page and not seeing an option for PayPal or any other popular payment option, it would be frustrating and discouraging. The lack of extensive payment processors also means that e-commerce platforms will be limited in terms of their possible customer base.
A business can sell to debit card users only or to debit card, PayPal, Monzo, ApplePay and GooglePay users as well. But setting up such payment options is not easy for merchants. Each option will need to be enabled in their website’s backend and this might require a significant amount of time and technical know-how. This can prove a challenge for merchants who want to expand their potential customer base but struggle to do so.
In response to this gap in the market, services like Rocky Road have sprung up to allow merchants to integrate various payment options to their sites with greater ease and for a more affordable cost. Far from novel, these sorts of services will become commonplace as e-commerce becomes more dominant.
Rocky Road and its Features
Rocky Road’s ultimate goal is making it easier for businesses to integrate payment options onto their sites with ease. With 39 payment options in its roster, Rocky Road users will be able to add virtually every payment option onto their websites. The integration process also does not take a long time and can be set up in under an hour.
In terms of currency, Rocky Road can be optimized to accept a wide variety of currencies from all over the world and from various locations. Thus, Rocky Road users can access a true global audience regardless of where the business itself is located. Market access is expanded with these options and revenue can be increased.
Users also have control of how many of the 39 options will be added to the website and options can be added and removed within the backend. The custom-built payment form will be displayed on the businesses’ checkout page
Rocky Road’s interactive backend shows a summary of all transactions taking place on the e-commerce site as well as overhead costs of the business. Rocky Road has served over 126,000 merchant clients so far and this shows that the market needs innovative payment solutions, which the company is effectively providing.
Overall, Rocky Road has been able to address all the common pain points; ease of use and installation, access to wider markets and backend tools that make the transition easier for the user. With time, and with the efforts of businesses like Rocky Road, we can expect to see a more financially-inclusive world with more ways to pay than ever before.
