Strategic Views on the eCommerce Industry

By Matt Bullock, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, eWay

Matt Bullock, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, eWay

Any small business owner knows how valuable time is, so you can use technology to your advantage and ensure that all of your platforms are integrated into your payments visibly, your accounting software, shopping cart, inventory, etc. This is especially important for omni-channel retailers, as many POS payment devices (even the big names) do not integrate even with inventory, so you see retailers reconciling their stock after a day of trading. If you have a platform with strong integration, all of your data stays up to date in real-time this way and it allows you to provide a better experience for your customers.

Anyone who has a payment platform that doesn’t integrate well is wasting their valuable time. Speaking of time, just like retailers wouldn’t like their shoppers to find it hard to contact them, online merchants want to have different options to get in touch with their online payments solution. Therefore, focus should always be on making customer service a priority and availability for 24/7 phone calls, online chat and video chat with each one of your clients become significant.

"Security is paramount to eCommerce and having high protection systems against fraud is essential with highly sophisticated security and fraud protection"

Most platforms required running an online store such as, a website template or a shopping cart or payments platform and all of its add-ons provide that service a percentage fee of the sale made. Because store sales vary wildly depending on the store size, understanding the different pricing models can be really complex, especially as many payments platforms have different fees on different kinds of credit card providers.

Couple with different rates that too for international cards and foreign exchange fees makes it incredibly difficult for a store owner to accurately predicts what their expenses will be for doing business each month.

Preventing Fraud Risks through a Secure and Safe eCommerce Platform

As with any industry linked directly to monetary transactions, security is paramount to eCommerce and having high protection systems against fraud is essential with highly sophisticated security and fraud protection. eWAY’s Beagle Fraud Alerts uses ReD (Retail Decision) that checks every transaction against a global database of card activity and automatically denies transactions that are suspicious. Beagle Live helps to prevent fraudulent activity before the transaction is referred to the customer bank. It provides the most comprehensive protection for merchants against chargebacks — which a lot of other payment solutions are known to have issues with. Beagle also helps merchants safely expand into new markets.

The Rising eCommerce Trends in Australia

However, a new trend is emerging globally nowadays, where online stores are opening up bricks and mortar presence. This mix can be very effective and it has a strong impact on brand awareness, and also giving customers a tangible experience with your product. Omni-channel retail is growing in Australia along with omni-channel payments technology. As mentioned earlier, it’s important for retailers to have their online and offline payments systems in sync and have their shopping cart and inventory, accounting software and payments all integrated.

From a physical card payments perspective, Australia has always been ahead of the curve, with chip and PIN and paypass technology. But where we’ve definitely lagged is mobile payments. We are currently witnessing the beginning of change in Australia — in fact eWAY will be the first platform that allows merchants to offer their customers both Android Pay and Apple Pay — but there are many hurdles we need to overcome. Big providers have had issues with the Australian banks, who have been hesitant to let go of a slice of the pie that they have enjoyed for so long. Mobile payments will be incredibly important for the ongoing growth of our industry and with the establishment of committees like the Federal Government Fintech expert advisory group; we’re at least heading in the right direction.

From the second half of 2015, we’ve seen the adoption of mobile wallets start to roll out in Australia, with Apple Pay and Android Pay leading the way. We are yet to see a significant increase in the uptake of mobile payments after some of the country’s major banks have launched their mobile wallet solutions earlier this year. This will generate a healthy competitive environment, which is always a good thing for small businesses.