Fuel and convenience merchants are facing unique payment challenges in today’s landscape.
As traditionally POS-based businesses, fuel and convenience retailers must facilitate transactions from payment terminals across a diverse hardware footprint.
In this blog post, we’ll reveal some top challenges faced by fuel and convenience retailers and how payment orchestration can help to simplify operations.
Payment challenges for today’s fuel and convenience retailers
Fuel and convenience retailers are under continual pressure to stay ahead of the competition and satisfy customer demand. And that can be particularly complicated given the wide spectrum of channels and payment hardware for different use cases:
- Pay at the pump: Using an unattended terminal
- Pay in-store: Convenience purchases and activating fuel pumps
- Pay by app: Activate pump from a mobile device
- Pay by plate: Automatically scan plate number and carry out a ‘pull’ transaction
- Pay by fleet card: Paying via closed-loop fleet card networks
- Pay at charger: Pay at EV charging station
Merchants operating in-person channels may prioritize robust, secure hardware and integrated POS systems that are capable of handling high transaction volumes while ensuring data integrity.
In addition to accepting payments in the customers’ preferred ways, fuel and convenience retailers may also want to:
- Offer loyalty cards to increase repeat business
- Ensure the security of sensitive customer payment information and remain compliant to PCI standards
- Simplify the maintenance and provisioning of their hardware and software
- Have a reliable network for their forecourt and service station to protect the premises and terminals from outages
Retailers select their preferred service providers to achieve these capabilities, but also need the solutions to work together in a single payment ecosystem. To ensure the dots connect, merchants are increasingly relying on payment orchestration.
What is payment orchestration?
Payment orchestration allows enterprise merchants to build their unique payments ecosystem, giving them the possibility to select and effortlessly integrate with best-of-breed infrastructure and commerce enablers, whether in-person (e.g., POS terminal) or online (e.g., in-app).
Payment orchestration is a cloud-native solution that integrates all these different and constantly evolving payment solutions and providers into a single API layer. This helps merchants seamlessly connect to various commerce-enabling endpoints and payment ecosystem stakeholders, routing between them for optimum payment outcome.
Payment orchestration simplifies payments for complex use cases
To see how these complexities come to life in a typical fuel and convenience operation, let’s have a look at the fictional, but typical, case of Fuel Mart Express.
Fuel Mart manages a complex set of payment vendors and has recently acquired a smaller domestic chain, Express. While Fuel Mart cherry-picked their vendors to best meet their needs, Express has an entirely different payment and technology set-up. Fuel Mart handles a complex set of use cases such as pay by plate and purchases via their proprietary app, but now needs to enable these new use cases across the newly acquired chain.
The conglomerate, Fuel Mart Express, wants to avoid committing to a major restructuring of the payment set-up, as each chain has proprietary software systems, hardware devices and existing contracts with payment vendors. They’d like to ‘use what they have’ while deploying a common solution across the two brands’ locations and use cases.
In this complex scenario, payment orchestration enables Fuel Mart Express to knit everything together via a singular middle layer. With an orchestrator, Fuel Mart Express is able to leverage existing integrations across software and hardware, and manage the long list of payment vendors in a merchant portal which enables analytics and transactions reporting across all channels.
TNS transformed a leading fuel retailer’s payment ecosystem
One of APAC’s biggest fuel retailers transformed their payment reliability, manageability and extensibility with the help of TNS. TNS rolled out 8,000 Android-based terminals in just nine months. And enabled the fuel retailer to accept contactless payments, QR codes, APMs, digital wallets, fuel and loyalty cards and traditional payment types. Plus, refined their physical terminal replacement down to between 15-20 minutes.
Checklist: Build your ideal payment ecosystem
An ideal payment ecosystem would help fuel and convenience retailers tackle the unique challenges of their business.
In this post, we’ve touched on payment orchestration for fuel and commerce merchants – but that’s only scratching the surface. That’s why we’ve worked with Flagship Advisory partners to create a deep-dive report https://tnsi.com/mobility-retail-payment-orchestration/.
This report includes a checklist of seven considerations you can use to analyze prospective payment solutions.
Plus, we’ll cover:
- Five common challenges unattended merchants are facing with payments
- Comparing three types of payment ecosystems to tackle the complexity of payments
- A side-by-side comparison of some ecosystems by use case
- An in-depth investigation of some payment solutions according to business size and complexity
- New research about the payment orchestration landscape
The payment landscape is growing increasingly complex. Our report will help you navigate the challenges.
David Hore is Director, Payments Architecture and Orchestrate Portfolio Lead at TNS with responsibility for its Accept and Orchestrate payment portfolios for the Payments Market Division.
