According to a report by UK-based Juniper Research, bots and natural language interfaces making remote mobile payments will count for more than $2 trillion across the globe in the upcoming 5 years. In the next 5 years, merchants using keyword research and menu-driven systems to direct consumers to products will face competitive disadvantages.
The study carried out by Juniper is called Mobile & Online Remote Payments for Digital & Physical Goods: Opportunities & Forecasts 2016-2021. It brings the example of an automated system used by an outdoor apparel company called The North Face. This intelligent digital assistant system gets into interaction with an online shopper so that to closely mimic an in-store salesperson to help with the sales process and checkout.
As Steffen Sorrell, the author of the report says, search and discovery of products is an extremely important part of the shopper journey. It is crucial to offer conversational consumer interface and put together intent with contextual product data in order to provide differentiation among merchants.
The report by Juniper highlights how it is important to have a seamless payment process. The report discusses the importance of antifraud systems based on machine learning aiming to minimize unnecessary declines. Also, the study targets payment technology that is able to recognize bad formatting or misrouted connections to the acquiring bank. According to the report, these will join with automated natural language processing so to make online shopping experience optimized, especially with regard to mobile devices.
The research found out that retailers are focusing on improving the checkout experience. Juniper Research points to a Swedish eCommerce firm called Klarna. The latter has decided to stop using card number entries, usernames, and passwords. Instead, the firm aims to allow shoppers to submit information that can easily be remembered such as email addresses and postal codes.
The focus on streamlining mobile checkout could play a special role for the “OS-Pay” mobile wallets, as Juniper calls them, Apple Inc’s Apple Pay, and Alphabet Inc’s Android Pay. All these provide a wide variety of payment methods and biometric authentication.