Visa Says Payment Choice Keeps High-Value Shoppers at Checkout

The new American shopper can tell an artificial intelligence platform precisely what she wants, compare the answer (even while standing in the store) and abandon the merchant at checkout because the wrong payment option appears. That combination of sophistication and impatience is changing the merchant-consumer equation. Consumers have acquired better tools for finding products, comparing offers and deciding how to buy. Merchants, meanwhile, still have to answer some stubbornly basic questions: Do we recognize this customer? Is this AI agent legit? Can it read the catalog? Can the agent assess and apply promotion and loyalty offers? And can she pay the way she expects?

The answers won’t surprise any merchant who puts the consumer at the center of their business. Michele Herron , senior vice president and head of North America Value Added Services at Visa, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that AI adoption is showing up among precisely the consumers merchants most want to understand. “The data is telling us that the best shoppers are AI enabled,” Herron said. People who browse more often and check their phones while shopping are valuable consumers who also show a strong affinity for AI. That changes the merchant calculus around AI. Early assumptions cast shopping agents as useful primarily for consumers who wanted software to handle an unwanted chore. Herron noted that joint research between Visa Acceptance and PYMNTS Intelligence to produce the sixth annual Global Digital Shopping Index indicate that AI and people who love to shop are highly correlated. Their shopping is also hard to contain within conventional measures of visits or channels. Webster pointed to 52 buying days a month among AI users versus 21 for nonusers, reflecting multiple shopping occasions within individual calendar days. High-income consumers record 54 digital buying days. A digital buying day is defined as an instance over the course of a given month in which a consumer uses a digital device to shop. The phone joins those occasions together. Webster described the “always-on shopper” as one for whom “the phone is literally the store,” with browsing and buying blending rather than occurring as distinct activities.

What merchants can’t assume is that being present on that phone is enough. Payment choice has become part of merchant selection. Webster said the study data finds that roughly two-thirds of consumers consider payment preference and acceptance when deciding where to shop, compared with 58% two years ago. Herron sees a tension there. Payments technology has spent years trying to remove itself from the consumer’s attention, yet consumers still care deeply about what happens at the moment of payment. “Payments are best when they’re invisible, but they have to work exactly the way that consumer wants to,” Herron said.

Merchants Need to Know the Shopper Again AI makes the customer-recognition problem more difficult because an agent may arrive carrying detailed instructions from a shopper without giving the merchant much insight into who that shopper is. That is potentially valuable information. Webster said an AI prompt can provide far richer context than a traditional keyword search, describing what someone wants, the circumstances surrounding the purchase and the attributes that matter. Yet Herron said merchants frequently can’t connect that in...