While it’s not surprising that online purchases have increased during the pandemic, 25% of shoppers made big-ticket purchases without ever entering a store. Mobile usage throughout the purchase journey is also up significantly, with 76% of consumers using mobile devices to research products and make purchases.
Card-linked offers, such as “get 5% cash back at Retailer X,” have become ubiquitous in online banking. And although targeting has improved, they’ve looked fairly similar for a while. Consumers ask “Why don’t I get offers from merchants I spend the most with?” The answer has to do with the limitations of bank-transaction data.
A cap on debit card swipe fees enacted by the Federal Reserve five years ago has helped reduce costs for retailers and consumers but is still higher than intended by Congress and should be lowered, according to the National Retail Federation.
Retailers as a whole missed the recent industry-imposed deadline for enabling secure chip-enabled card transactions, known as EMV.