A look back on 2020: Dalenys, rising to the tremendous challenges of commerce and payments

As all players in the commerce and payment sector, we didn't know how great the particular challenges of Covid-19 would be in 2020. To support our customers – e-merchants, retailers, franchisees, etc. – we upgraded our technological solutions and reinforced our teams with the best experts to provide assistance in a number of key areas for their business: click & collect, multi-channel refunds, payment through links, marketplace, etc. Not forgetting the migration to PSD2, which began this year, having a major impact on e-commerce.

Of course, this year has been unlike any other, which makes us even prouder to have gained the trust of major brands from a range of sectors for the management of their online and in-store payments:  Le Coq Sportif, Yellow Korner, Naf Naf, or Asos.

Last summer, we announced that we were transforming and enhancing our solutions to propose new value to our customers: a unified payment platform for commerce.

Thanks to these advancements, we are continuing to support some excellent online and physical brands in their development, and boost the performance of their purchasing processes. We believe that payment is no longer an end in itself; it's just the start of the story between the merchant and the consumer: Payment is just the start! (Re)discover these developments by watching:

The shop: a key leg of the digital shopping journey

Right from the first weeks of lockdown in March 2020, many retailers acted fast by implementing initiatives to continue to safeguard their relationship with customers and, where possible, their sales. Ideas flowed in, as you can see from an article on the best practices for dealing with the crisis. As shops closed and reopened with strict health protocols in place, click & collect took centre stage in 2020, as did drive, Pay By Link and Ship from store, which we analysed after the first lockdown. This was when we provided a best practice guide for implementing click & collect.

Marie Blachère, which has a network of more than 500 bakeries throughout France, used the Dalenys payment solution to launch a click & collect service for its sales.

More generally, merchants have been faced with the task of reinventing the in-store experience to bring customers back when possible. Store to web, try and pay later, queue busting, multichannel refunds: all of these are opportunities to enrich and streamline the purchase experience, which we delve into in this article.

After so much disruption, we wanted to analyse the latest French practices and expectations in terms of the digitalisation of their shops. At the end of November, we therefore conducted a survey among French respondents with OpinionWay*. Explore the info graphics containing the key results:

E-commerce gets boost from crisis

As online sales understandably surged during the various lockdowns, Dalenys has been supporting e-commerce players by boosting their capacity to process Visa, CB and Mastercard transactions. On Black Friday 2020, the Dalenys platform beat its record with more than 1 million transactions in less than 24 hours. This meant a +40% increase in transactions over one day compared to Black Friday 2019**, while still maintaining the same acceptance rate and same quality of service for our customers.

The marketplace, an ever-growing success

This year, as consumers have shifted online more than ever before, the marketplace has provided key advantages: it allows retailers to broaden their range and appeal with customers by offering services and products from third-party vendors. There are many different marketplace models, taking various different forms, which we have been analysing since the beginning of autumn 2020. Yet they ultimately only reflect the changes in consumption patterns and their mirror image in terms of distribution. They are evolving as fast as commerce itself!

See also the 5 recipes for success of the 2020 marketplaces: http://dalenys.annarenaudin.net/blog/5-ingredients-for-a-successful-marketplace-in-2020/

Some new innovations have also been introduced: Oney and Dalenys have made payments in instalments available on marketplaces. The Ubaldi e-commerce site, which sells household appliances, high tech, bedding and furniture, and the Ecole de Ski Français marketplace ‘mon-sejour-en-montagne’, have used this payment option to improve the customer experience they provide.

Dalenys is the first payment service provider to have integrated Apple Pay, gaining acceptance by the main card payment schemes in France. The Les Echos group – together with Capital Finance and Le Parisien – is therefore the first Dalenys customer to benefit from all three acceptance schemes: CB, Mastercard and Visa in Apple Pay.

See the press release (in French): http://dalenys.annarenaudin.net/fr/blog/dalenys-premier-psp-en-france-a-lancer-apple-pay-sur-cb-mastercard-et-visa/

The year also saw the ramping up of the migration to PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2), which impacts all e-commerce players. The major change brought in by this directive is that the banks which issued the cards are to become the decision-maker in requesting strong authentication, and no longer the merchant.

We have produced a number of documents to assist you:

Dalenys, the payment specialist of the Groupe BPCE, is the second largest banking group in France and the leading issuer of Visa cards in continental Europe. This affiliation gives us a comprehensive overview of payments and a unique knowledge of issuer data modelling. This therefore enables us to understand how issuers will apply this new model and makes us a valuable partner for e-merchants in managing the change.

Right from the start of the migration, our technical teams connected 3DS V2 (the strong authentication protocol required under PSD2) to the CB, Visa and Mastercard schemes, enabling merchants to offer strong authentication on all card payments. The performance of these transactions has been improved thanks to an automatic retry mechanism set up by our teams to safeguard the turnover of online retailers. Find out more: http://dalenys.annarenaudin.net/blog/psd2-migration-a-vital-tool-to-handle-soft-declines-and-protect-your-revenue/

The health crisis has brought about a profound change to purchasing and payment behaviours, with a major boost for the digitalisation of consumer practices. Not only have contactless payments and e-commerce reached new heights, but there has also been a strong consumer demand for hybrid purchasing solutions that combine in-store and website/app experiences.

To address this new reality, retailers and e-merchants face numerous major challenges: customer loyalty, unified commerce, marketplace, PSD2 management, etc. As a long-standing partner of e-merchants – with a wide range of unified commerce and omni-channel solutions – Dalenys is perfectly positioned to support retailers and improve their performance. 

So that every payment is an opportunity to build a lasting relationship between merchants and their customers... 2021 is just the start!

*Source: “Digitalisation of commerce: French expectations for 2021” study by OpinionWay carried out for Dalenys on 25 and 26 November 2020
**Dalenys Source: figures from our internal data for the years 2019 and 2020