Industry: Financial Services
Featured Methods: In-Depth Interviews
A global financial services company constantly sought ways to build stronger relationships with online retailers in order to maintain its leadership position. To address that goal, the company wanted to better understand how merchants choose their payment partners, and in particular, how the merchants’ shopping cart partner influences that decision. They wanted deep insight into how merchants researched, considered and chose their payment partners. We were asked to conduct a study to uncover answers to these questions.
In order to gain a deep level of qualitative insight, we conducted interviews with a number of small- and medium-sized business owners representing a range of annual revenues (from $75,000 to $20 million) and business offerings (from women’s clothing to pet supplies). Local interviews were held at the merchants’ offices so that additional information about their environment could be collected. Additional national interviews were conducted by phone. To facilitate data collection, we developed an extensive discussion guide that included standardized open-ended questions and follow-up questions. Collecting data from interviews allowed our researchers to engage respondents in a friendly, conversational style, opening the door for participants to offer richer, more detailed responses about their interactions with their payment partners and shopping cart partner.
Through the course of the interviews and after careful data analysis, our researchers uncovered several key themes that provided our client’s team with concrete messaging and support opportunities. For example, we identified several methods that merchants use to find and choose a payments partner, from hiring an eCommerce consultant to seeking input from other financial institutions. In addition, our interviews revealed that merchants’ customers play a much larger role in the payment partner decision-making process than originally considered. In conjunction with these additional findings from the in-depth interviews, our client was able to better tailor their marketing efforts and resource allocations to more effectively connect with potential customers.
