Officials for Visa believe that the launch of Visa Commerce Network provides a new way for merchants to create online and in-app commerce customer experiences that will spark acquisition, drive customer loyalty, and increase sales with relevant offers.
Visa Commerce Network is built on the world’s largest electronic payment network, VisaNet, and can be easily utilized by merchants through a variety of simple, commerce application programming interfaces (APIs).
Visa Commerce Network works by connecting transactions between two merchants. For example, a hotel can provide its customers with offers from local restaurants using Visa Commerce Network, and with cardholder consent, track engagement and even issue rewards. Qualifying purchases are recognized at the point of sale and rewards can be seamlessly applied to cardholder accounts – eliminating the need for coupons or redemption schemes.
Currently, more than a dozen leading businesses, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Regal Entertainment Group, Shake Shack, and Uber have successfully used Visa Commerce Network.
Loyalty360 caught up with Mike Lemberger, SVP of Offers & Loyalty, Visa, to learn more about this innovative new network.
What factors prompted Visa to launch the Visa Commerce Network and what are your goals for it?
As the payments industry shifts from plastic to digital, we want to help our clients and merchants offer consumers a more secure, simple and consistent purchasing experience, regardless of where they are and what device they are using. Part of this industry shift includes the processing and management of offers, rewards, and loyalty programs. We believe this is an area that has been largely overlooked from an innovation perspective and we want to help, both merchants and consumers alike, find easier ways to be rewarded. Our goal is to scale Visa Commerce Network to become one of the largest sources of new customers for our merchant clients.
What makes the Visa Commerce Network unique from a customer engagement/customer experience/customer loyalty standpoint?
Many payment networks enable card-linking and often build destination sites/experiences where consumers can participate in those offers. Only Visa Commerce Network enables these experiences inside a merchant’s own product, where it’s natural for consumers to digest these promotions.
Additionally, Visa Commerce Network works by connecting transactions between two partnering merchants, providing an opportunity to reach new (and high-value) customers. Because we see every Visa credit card transaction in the U.S., we can close the loop between any online advertisement and offline credit card purchase, without requiring anything extra of the consumer or the merchant.
What metrics do you use to measure customer loyalty?
Since we work with so many different merchants, who in turn measure loyalty in various ways, we feel it’s important to provide tools to measure a range of metrics: New customers, repeat customers, redemption rates, and average ticket value are among the most important to our clients.
How do you define success?
We want to scale Visa Commerce Network to become one of the largest sources of customers for our merchant clients, so success to us is the number of “connections” the Visa Commerce Network brings to the commerce ecosystem, and ensuring merchants are finding their own success through their use of the product.
What are you most proud of?
We are proud of the product that we’ve built in less than a year since bringing the TrialPay team into Visa. Even more than that, we had a product we were testing with in-market within three months of closing the acquisition. We are excited to see what the next 10 months bring.