When digital merchants are planning their future investments, few of them will look back to the mid-20th century for inspiration.
But, when it comes to their payment capabilities, a new white paper from local payment specialist Boku suggests they should read up on the work of Buckminster Fuller – a mid-century American architect-come-futurist who invented the geodesic dome, designed a prototype for a flying car, and wrote a series of popular philosophy books.
One of Fuller’s theories was that, all too often, businesses reach for what’s expedient, not what’s right. And, to demonstrate the point, he came up with the parable of the piano top.
Imagine you’re in a shipwreck. You find yourself adrift in the icy water. At that moment, among the debris, the top of the ship’s grand piano comes floating past.
You grab it and it saves your life. And from that moment on, the piano top becomes the global standard for the life raft. After all, it worked once, it worked well, so why not use it again. And again, and again.
The next thing you know, factories around the world are tooled up to produce piano top life rafts.
All ships have standardised fittings for piano top life rafts. The die is cast. The use of piano top life rafts becomes more and more entrenched.
Yet, if you were starting from scratch, you would never design a life raft like this – not this shape, not this size, not carved from mahogany.
So, what’s the relevance to payments?
The card-based payment system, Boku argues, is a bit like a piano top life raft – something digital merchants reached for when e-commerce first took off, and which then became entrenched as the industry standard, even though it’s ill-equipped to do the job effectively.
Finally, a range of alternatives are flooding onto the scene in the shape of local payment methods (LPMs).
But, with hundreds of these LPMs now available, the challenge for digital merchants is to ensure they select an actual life raft – not a passing bed base, or a door, or some other random floating object.
The paper list some of the ways in which LPMs can outcompete card payments.
It then goes onto provide principles for merchants to follow when developing a coherent, evidence-based LPM acceptance strategy.
To find out more, download Choosing the right Local Payment Methods – How to select and onboard the Local Payment Methods that will make the biggest difference to your online sales.
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