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Nathan Bush: When you think about it, there are a lot of things that the current generation are gonna look back on our generation and go why the hell did you do that? From smoking cigarettes to watching commercial TV as a family, and even paying by credit card. Even though credit card is the most common form of payment now, I can't imagine that it's going to be that way into the future. It has been shown that younger generations are moving away from credit card as their main payment method. And it makes sense, total sense, because there are so many new payment methods emerging that aren't just about paying for a product but are actually part of a bigger growth picture, part of a community and rewarding customers in different ways that credit cards could never do. And I think we're pretty lucky here because in Australia we are actually on the leading edge I think of payment options, especially when it comes to replacing credit cards. So think about we when it came to tap to pay, we were one of the most advanced economies when it came to using that, either through cards or through our phones. We've also had the huge, huge success story of Afterpay here, which led the buy in for pay movement. And more recently we interviewed Carolyn Tran from hello Clever and I love that her proposition is tapping into two trends here it's about enabling peer to peer payments, which is reducing the cost of those transactions and facilitating those bank to bank payments from a B2C perspective, but also incorporating shop back and rewards for customers who pay in that way. Of course, why wouldn't a younger generation choose this method when they're getting rewarded through shop back and not getting slugged huge interest fees that they can't pay? Off. So today I want to unpack how new real time payment mechanisms and smart cashback strategies are giving businesses that get on the leading edge here a financial edge that can fuel growth, not just take payments. It's about being pragmatic and allowing smooth checkout, but actually turning payment into a profit and growth opportunity. So let's take a clip from my chat with Carolyn Tran from hello Clever where she breaks down how their C to B consumer to business payment system works as an innovative growth engine. All right, well I want to talk
Nathan Bush: about that growth engine being cashback and loyalty when you talk cashback. So let's take that example that you had before. I go through I buy a PC, I'm getting 300 back on my PC. Who's funding that cash back?
Carolyn Tran: So the merchant we fund, that's cash back. So in hello Clever Merchant dashboard there is a tool, it is called cashback campaign. What I would do is that we will let the merchants to flexibly set up a cashback campaign. Depends on their budget. Right. So if you think about all the cashback platforms like Shopback or cash Rewards, you have to go through another affiliate platform and it fix cashback. Right. We are dynamic. You can set up, let's say during pick time you give, you know, 3% and during like quiet time you give 5%. So it's super dynamic and it fit into your budget as well. So let's say I have $5,000 budget because it's coming out of your marketing bud. Let's run it during the quiet time. Right. And give them the most cash back or whatever you wanted to design it. So there's a product under our merchant dashboard, it's cashback campaign. Now we launched another product, it's called MyStone Campaign under hello Clever. So what it means is that you're going to rewards your regular. So it's like what we visualize it as a digital coffee card. So you come back and purchase a PC. You know, I don't know like once a year or whatever you rewards for further. So I come back and purchase and I get, you know, rewards even more. And it's all embedded into payment. Right. Cannot do this without a payment system. We give the customers cash direct.
Nathan Bush: And do you find that your merchants are advertising that cashback option further up in the journey or is it usually waiting until they get through to checkout to surface that?
Carolyn Tran: Yeah. So they would normally if they run a campaign like that, they will advertise it in their EDMS or on their website, right?
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Carolyn Tran: During the financial year you know, we do cash back during this time and this time. Right. Get quick and to be honest, over the campaigns run out like literally 15 minutes. It's crazy. It's run out $5,000 and so it means that customer actually going to wait for that moment to purchase and it's increase the revenue for the merchants at that point.
Nathan Bush: And they're justifying this cash back are they? By reduced fees?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: Okay. So that's the calculation you've got to do to understand that if I can shift customers to spend more, buy more and use real time payments via hello Clever. I can actually justify giving away this much cash back because I'm not losing in other fees.
Carolyn Tran: Yeah. So basically because you have been saving that much of payment fees, you're using our payment fees savings to become a cash back. Right. And then it help you to increase your revenue. It's literally a no brainer.
Nathan Bush: That makes sense. Tell me some of the most, what are some of the most creative examples that you've seen of integrating all this together?
Carolyn Tran: So we work with merchants in especially travel sector and for travel sector to be honest is quite high risk because what if Covid happens again? Right. So people cannot travel. So there are a few, you know, campaigns that we are launching with one of the I guess largest booking system in Asia Pacific. It's called Travel Loca. I'm not sure if you know them. So we've been running a few campaigns with them and you know we see how payment has saved them a lot of fees. Right. Because they are a global business. So they, they sell tickets in like 50 countries and you can imagine how you can do all of a payment integration in each of every single country if you go through hello Clover. We can just do that to you. Right. Literally.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha.
Carolyn Tran: So it save a lot of technical efforts as well as you know, we can centralize everything in one place. So you are as a payment manager or like a financial manager, you can just go into our payment dashboards and have a look at which country you've gone live and who has been paying and buying which tickets. Right. So it has been a really interesting use case for us. So we do find a lot of traction in high ticket items, for example computer stores, furnitures and then travel sector. Right.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Carolyn Tran: We'll sell globally.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. It's such a killer breakdown from Carolyn and potentially do we have another Nick Molnar on our hands here? I love how she explains that the payment rail itself can actually drive growth, not just power it and enable it, but fuel it. And that was similar to the afterpay model where they created this community of retailers on afterpay, where customers demanded that other retailers have afterpay, otherwise they'll shop with this community. So that was their growth driver. Whereas Caroline's going for that shop back cashback option by building on the NPP and the PayID rails. Hello, clever is cutting out the middleman, which means that they have more cash to spend and to give back. And merchants are saving that 3 to 4% in processing fees to be able to reinvest straight back to customers through instant cashback. Pretty clever, right? And I think there's a huge opportunity right now with cash rewards no longer with us, that customers have learned that habit and are now feeling like they might be missing out. There's a huge opportunity if you can tie that to payment as well. But the money side is only half the story. If we want people to actually use new payment methods, we've gotta make it easy and trustworthy from the first click. I always come back to this from Sonja Friedrich back in episode 392 where she tells us all the time, friction kills conversion. So yes, you can have the best incentives, the best cashback ever. If the payment isn't smooth, it's going to kill conversion. And we know that approximately one in five credit card payments fail, so we can't have a system where one in five fails. The more friction you give, the less conversion you'll have. The more mental effort you ask for, the more customers will tap out. So if you are introducing a new payment option, even one with a great hook like instant cash back, the process has to feel effortless. Think guest checkout simple. Think instant checkout simple. No extra forms, no overthinking. So here's the play. Number one, turn savings into customer wins. There is an emergence of new payment platforms that are cheaper than traditional methods. As Carolyn said, 3 to 4% fees you're losing to credit card, reinvest them back into cash back or loyalty. That will hit instantly. It will encourage customers to come back, spend more, more word of mouth. It becomes a bit of a flywheel then for your payment. The quicker the reward, the higher the adoption. Because we all love extra things at checkout. Make it instant. Number two, make the experience invisible. Even though we're asking customers to trial a new payment method, peer to peer, and PayID isn't new, so it's not a totally new learning experience, your new payment flow can't take a big learning opportunity, especially in the checkout. The payment flow needs to feel like the path of least resistance. Think shop Pay that feels really easy now. Might not have been at the start, but right now that feels really easy. That's what you're competing against. Payment has to be that smooth. Don't make customers think. And number three, pick payments that build trust. Choose Rails that actually help you retain customers. Fewer features mean fewer drop offs, fewer more repeat purchases and stronger data signals to build loyalty around. After all, Visa and MasterCard have built their brands through trust. That's what you're up against if you're asking customers to switch. Trust needs to be at the core of this. So make sure that you're showing that all your payment methods are trustworthy through an easy process and smooth transactions. The payments world is moving fast and I love that we're here in Australia and we're leading the way. The smart operators in retail are realizing that it's not just about saving on fees, trying to get down to close to zero percent. It's about building a growth loop that funds itself. Real time payments, cash back, loyalty, trust. When you connect all of those dots, you're not just processing transactions, you're building a business that converts faster, retains longer and scales smarter. It's very clever. If you want to discuss real time payments or other ways that you can really take advantage of new transaction methods in your checkout, I encourage you to come on over to the Add to Cart community where you can discuss and ask questions on all of this stuff. We have a community of over 500 e commerce professionals in there ready to answer your questions, share their tips, share their experiences, and connect you to people who might have been in your scenario before. So come on over, it's free to join and addtocart. Com, join the community and we'd love to see you in there to share your knowledge and help each other out. And of course, if you're listening to this on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple, we'd love you to hit that subscribe button. And we're going to continue bringing you more Playbooks to help growing your e commerce business. See you next time.
