Among the many quotable bon mots from the former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the phrase “all politics is local” has stood out, as advice to aspiring politicians to train their focus on the real issues people actually care about: the local ones.
But while politics may or may not still be local, commerce has for many years trended away from a focus on locality. In the era of the internet, it seems the opposite mantra might actually apply. All retail is now global, because digital connections make it possible for a consumer on one side of the world to transact with a merchant all the way on the other.
But for all the global capability the digital era has enabled, recent PYMNTS data indicates that consumers still want to shop locally worldwide. Pushed by the pandemic and the crisis it created for small merchants, consumers’ desire to support local businesses is driving a surge of interest in transacting with local merchants. Forty-four percent of consumers in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Brazil (hereafter referred to as “surveyed consumers”) believe it is “very” or “extremely” important to shop with local retailers, and 53 percent say it is either “more” or “much more” important to shop with them now than it was before the pandemic began.
Merchants have a worldwide opportunity, but only if they can pursue it. Up until now, there hasn’t been a single set of tools to make it easy for smaller merchants to capture and capitalize on consumers’ growing sense of loyalty, but PayPal is hoping to bring it into the market with its release of the PayPal Zettle POS solution.
Capturing the ‘Think Local Movement’
As for the “whys,” 45 percent of surveyed consumers who would like to shop with local retailers say they are motivated because they want to reinvest in their local economies, 44 percent say it is because they want to keep money in their communities, while 43 percent want to drive job growth in their communities. The findings vary based on geography: Brazilian consumers put the greatest focus on shopping local and U.K. consumers emphasize it the least. Here in the U.S., nearly 40 percent of consumers said it was very important to them to shop locally, while almost 47 percent said it was more important now than it was pre-pandemic.
But consumers’ intentions to shop local are often derailed by the actual shopping experience offered by their local merchants, as processes can at times be clunky. As PayPal’s Jim Magats noted in a conversation with Karen Webster, every customer has had the unfortunate experience of ordering something online for pickup at a local retailer, only to arrive and find out that their inventory system isn’t well synced to the purchase platform, and the item they paid for isn’t actually there.
It’s not that SMBs don’t want to offer well-synced systems to their customers, he noted — it’s that the necessary tool hasn’t existed at scale in the market. That reality inspired this week’s launch in the States of PayPal Zettle, a digital POS system designed to offer merchants a single point from which to manage and enable online/offline transactions, accept QR codes and control things like inventory management, invoicing and working capital management.
SMBs want to respond to the growing consumer needs, Magats noted — but to really rise to the digital occasion, they need a “small-business-in-a-box” solution with which to do it.
“For us, it’s a natural extension of what we’ve been doing online and on mobile over the course of the last 20 years: serving SMBs with an in-store solution that interoperably works with an online solution. It’s the next stage of our evolution into omnichannel payments,” Magats told Webster.
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