Five top payment tips to prepare for retail peaks

Driven by summer sales and prominent ecommerce shopping events including Singles’ Day, October Golden Week, Black Friday and the year-end holiday season, the second half of the year is critical.

A study by GlobalData indicates that the summer sales period, which typically spans from June to August, accounts for approximately 20% of the annual retail sales in the UK.

This trend is not limited to the UK, as these sales attract shoppers from all over the world who seek to bag a good bargain.

For retailers, this means you need to ensure your stores are not only well-stocked but also well-equipped payments wise so as not to lose out this bumper season.

When it comes to boosting revenue, enabling seamless checkouts is just as important as tapping into the best FX rates and secure payments.

But how can retailers prep their payments strategy accordingly to ready themselves for a surge of shoppers?

1. Understand your shoppers and their payment preferences

The key to better conversions is making checkouts easier for your customers. Convenience and ease of payments can help remove friction in the checkout process.

First, pay attention to how your customers prefer to pay – whether online or in store. Then, make it easier for them to check out.

2. Make easier online payments with one-click checkout

According to UX studies by Baymard Institute 18% of shoppers abandon their carts due to lengthy or complicated checkout processes.

By reducing the friction typically associated with multi-step checkouts, one-click solutions improve the customer journey and reduce cart abandonment rates.

One-click checkouts help streamline payments by letting shoppers skip the tedious manual input of payment, shipping and billing details – and complete the purchase right away.

3. Allow quicker in-person payments with contactless options

Contactless payments are on the rise, as observed by retailers across the globe.

Whether in card-dominant markets or markets where mobile wallets are favoured, shoppers are choosing digital and contactless payments over cash.

Shoppers are paying via their mobile phones by tokenising their credit cards, using e-wallet apps and via QR code.

4. Secure and optimise your revenue with fraud prevention strategies and tools

As retailers gear up for the high-demand Q3 and Q4 sale season, striking the balance between a frictionless shopping experience and robust fraud prevention becomes paramount.

During major sales events like Black Friday or Singles’ Day, the uptick of transactions poses both an opportunity and a challenge, as fraud attempts often spike.

Retailers must adopt fraud detection tools to identify suspicious activities in real-time without blocking genuine transactions.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), strong customer authentication (SCA), seamless identity verification and tokenisation of sensitive payment data should underpin these strategies, ensuring that convenience does not come at the expense of security.

Learn about the top fraud trends global brands need to pay attention to in 2025, and how these trends vary across regions.

5. Optimise your earnings with an FX strategy

Managing foreign exchange (FX) volatility is also crucial to optimising revenues, as currency fluctuations can directly impact profit margins; this is especially important when catering to international customers.

An FX solution can help automate conversions at competitive rates, lock in favourable exchange rates and manage multi-currency settlements seamlessly, ensuring better earnings this sale season.

With an FX strategy, not only can you provide localised pricing in consumers’ preferred currencies, improving conversion rates and enhancing shopping experiences, you can also protect your revenue from unexpected margin erosion.