Point Of Sale (POS) payments are no longer just over the shop counter; they also includes payments from sales on the Internet, on mobile phones and on many other devices. Nevertheless, whatever the POS, retailers have to accept the payment systems that most of their customers want to pay with, so they don't limit their sales. This is why payments by cash and cheques are accepted by some retailers even on the Internet.

Increasingly, retailers are splitting their merchant acquiring business. Giving the payment card transactions over the shop counter business to local acquirers and the collection of card payments over the Internet and other channels - the e-commerce transactions - to the large e-tailing acquirers, such as Chase Paymentech and HSBC, who process collect card payments for global companies such as Apple and Google and for large multi-national corporations.

At a Chase Paymentech seminar in London last week on 'eCommerce Consumer Experience' with presentations from Richard Braham, Policy Adviser — Distance Selling, Payments and Consumer Credit, British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Ray McDonnel, SVP, Sales & Business Development, Chase Paymentech Europe Ltd, and the following networking produced several insights and tips on successful e-tailing programmes:

• accept it is a multi-channel world, cater for PCs, tablets, smartphones AND, wherever possible, make the buying experience consistent across all devices
• allow customers to start their order on one device and complete it on another
• ensure that you are able to analyse fraud rates per channel
• keep the mandatory information required on purchases, particularly for mobile phones, to a minimum
• BRC research shows that there has been a rapid rise in purchases from UK based retailers sites from the emerging markets
• attractive Internet shopping offerings have, according to BRC's research, to cost the same or better as in the shop, and the service experience has to be integrated, and ubiquitous across multiple devices on- and off-line AND enjoyable, so that the purchaser does not abandon their purchase. If not the customer goes somewhere else
• in some retailers, 30% or more of all transactions are abandoned
• BRC use of alternative payment methods, now account for 5% of all transactions (more than double 2011), driven by manufacturers' money-off coupons and the rapid growth of comparatively new ways to pay such as PayPal and online payments.