Merchant Management: 5 Essential Features for Aggregators

Payment service providers, food delivery platforms and e-commerce marketplace platforms are high-growth businesses. Global digitization trends and digital-first customers’ fast-changing tastes are driving rapid development, making these sectors some of the most intriguing and valuable enterprises worldwide. The distinct and crucial function of merchant acquisition and management operations also binds these sectors. How successfully platform firms manage and nurture the enormous, scattered, and chaotic merchant-partner ecosystem determines their success in these growing sectors.

Start with merchant onboarding. Two sides are involved:

  • Velocity: An hour of onboarding delay might cost a merchant in marketplaces where major competitors are fighting for dominance. Platform companies must compete by decreasing merchants’ time-to-value by ensuring speedy onboarding and frictionless sign-up.
  • Compliance: systems must meet KYC and regulatory requirements for each location. With fraud risk rising in certain emerging countries, platforms must employ proper verification steps.

Enter the digital onboarding provider. Platforms are using digital merchant onboarding for speed and compliance. Digital onboarding includes document processing, verification, storage, and administration, as well as digital signatures and e-KYC procedures. Digital onboarding has become a need in various platform businesses because of their fierce competition. Digital onboarding/e-KYC solution vendors are expanding, with varied strengths.

Beyond Onboarding

Onboarding is just part of merchant management. The right sales reps must be assigned to the right merchants (lead allocation), they must be onboarded (e-KYC), and the relationship with this large list of merchants must be nurtured over time. An onboarding solution and a CRM system to manage leads and connections are typical enterprise solutions.

Besides the fact that having two or more systems in the merchant lifecycle will lead to integration inefficiencies, the question is whether standard CRMs, even the best (you know which ones), can meet these platform industries’ lead- and partner-management needs.

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A meal delivery network in India contains tens of thousands of eateries of all sizes (from street-side snack vendors to major restaurants) in cities and towns, tracked down by vast and spread field sales teams. Mobility—the capacity to effectively discover and handle leads/partners on the go—is key. Traditional CRMs, which are bulky and desktop-based, are unsuitable for field salespeople and managers engaging with merchants.

One-stop shop for merchants

Platform providers want a customized merchant management platform. One option that meets these 5 must-haves:

  1. Intelligent Lead Gen: Geolocation-based lead creation; bulk-uploading leads and auto-allocating them to sales agents based on location and track record.
  1. Fast self-service and rep-driven onboarding: e-KYC with digital document upload and verification, picture capture, and liveness checks.
  1. Data-driven Engagement Guidance: Sales staff and management get intelligent nudges to engage and energize lagging merchants.
  1. insight & Analytics: Sales managers and executives have full insight into merchant performance data, trends, segmentation, promotions, and success rates.
  1. True Mobile-First: A lightweight, user-friendly mobile experience that representatives can utilize on the go, integrated with back-end technologies.

Essentially, it’s a productivity tool that meets all merchant management needs. Now is the moment for SME-aggregation companies to streamline their merchant lifecycle process.

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