Buy now. We own the phrase, live its many shapes and permutations. We hover over a glyph, poised to press, about to release our money to an icon of colour and type. Static or neutral. Sexy, quiet or brash. Be it pill or brick.
“Click me,” it whispers, propelling us to complete the rush – unless we resist the cues, backpedal and abandon the feeling.
Analytics struggles to answer why.
But we all know.
Too extravagant. Sky-high freight. Long lead time. Shit returns. Too ugly. Poor match.
“Click me” teases us along without any regard. The shape’s friendly, dancing, nubile, fit, seductive and not to be stopped. If not now, then later.
Impulsively we scan our basket, autofill with a fingerprint and wait a few seconds or less for confirmation of our commitment in a banking app: verified and authorized, with a pleasing ping of a shipping notification saying on its way.
So what if our desire gets the better of us and we’re declined – there’s a better, seamless customer experience: buy now, pay later!
There’s nothing and everything to see in this beautiful buy, almost conception if we wish. Behind the scenes the co-bots are beavering away to make a shopping experience so fabulous that we won’t wobble at the amount departing our accounts.
But what are the mechanics to buy now and why care about it?
By chance I’ve been flogging the leftovers of the hybrid work boom online and learning the intricacies of buy now. Call me an agent tasked with a merchant’s expansion into Europe – a reseller with bite so they claim.
Buy now is not a magic ticket to monetary nirvana. Behind the icon, an online reseller may well struggle with the landscape.
Hefty prices, killer freight, low availability, unexpected tax, clunky payments.
Mastering the game requires a committed owner and a deft team with defined and owned areas of expertise and responsibility, along with prescience to anticipate the cultural nuances of markets. To tame it requires a marriage of human smarts, experience and lots of effort.
In the nonchalance of the blue sky, there’s a promise, a generative AI utopia without labor, where computers, machines and numbers can optimize us all into a boring, workless idyll – not today’s heaven on earth.
Undeterred and on trend, bosses quiz their teams, “Those tasks are still manual?”
Of course, they’re right and we’re accountable – AI can pitch in for oafs like us. But let’s not forget an old notion of reality: if we don’t key in the changes and check that they’re correct, neither machines nor anyone else will gain.
While innovation may be an aphrodisiac to profits, an obsession to change (disrupt) before the paint has dried on the last innovation can be unsustainable, diverting a company away from its values and delivery.
That anxiety tumbles into buy now and the human click that triggers its embrace.
The cliché holds: business begins with relationships.
Companies awarded deep discounts, great terms and conditions and free shipping in one economic area may struggle to migrate their perks to another. Resellers may lack a bare minimum of legal entities, have no sales record and no volume – all of which needs to be sorted out. That’s where the ABCD of ambition, bluff, connections and diplomacy come into play, for historical relationships open paths to market and manufacturers’ best pricing tiers. Here, as negotiations spiral into escalations along leadership chains, it makes sense to accept a flexible pricing strategy and to budget ahead in case leveraging only goes so far. Pray for enough resources left over to patch, adapt and scale up the icon.
To imagine buy now in all its glory, let’s untangle the numbers.
Take as our premise that each item in an online shop has a unique identifying part number (PN) or stock keeping unit (SKU). Under this unique number exists a hierarchy of associated numbers that enable companies, manufacturers, vendors, customers and transactions to speak to one another through an application programming interface (API) when making orders.
In turn, the APIs, essentially gateways into partners’ systems that are connected by a developer with a token. They make visible stock levels, prices, discounts, rebates, lead time and may record tracking numbers or serial numbers associated with a unique part number. A huge beneficiary to efficiency, they eliminate the need for emails and calls among parties. Typically, they integrate into an enterprise resource planner (ERP) like NetSuite which allows this information to be managed and updated almost in real time.
These unique numbers from manufacturers may reflect colour, frequencies, power supply or USB A or C, cordless or corded, and they are assigned to each product along with its description by a purchaser.
Scale up and multiply those numbers by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand for a decent offering in an online shop, then multiply them again if they are to sell in a different currency or multiple territories like EMEA, APAC, MINA or other trade regions.
Alongside a real order, a processor follows up in parallel to verify payments, doublecheck stock and prices corresponding to the part numbers in vendor portals, email customers, babysit orders to dispatch, retrieve tracking, field support and returns. A processor also is expected to flag glitches and spot room for improvements in the flow of the shopping experience and the processes afterward.
Drill down into each product to assess the layers of rare earth elements under their plastic carcasses, and you will discover countless parts each having their own unique numbers in a near infinitesimal dance. In our case, let’s not underestimate the wonder and engineering of the technology on sale: microphones that fence out all ambient noise, lenses that focus and zoom without assistance as we move, virtual rooms that allow us to share files and draw remotely in real time and freely ideate.
The wonder is that the numbers can be assigned to anything. Grids of resources mapped even before extraction to the surface for sorting and processing. Fields and animals sustained on a per individual basis to engineer water and nutrients. Immaculately guided machines treating crops for weed and pests. Harvests batched and assigned bar codes until they reach our shelves and mouths.
To recap, a company has entered information on thousands of products, each with at least one unique number that can be transmitted to a supplier to identify and retrieve stock and price information and then, based on the potential success of the user experience and transaction online, to place orders.
Once this is all reconciled – each product linked correctly to all the information in play and loaded into a resource planner in the cloud – a company will be able to learn from agglomerated sales data: where are its customers; what, how much and how frequently they buy; and begin to forecast what’s moving on the market and where to unearth more profits.
But we’re two steps ahead, with payments to sort before any interpretation of customer data, along with the caveat that none of this may function as planned in beta. A development team may spend hours integrating distributors’ feeds for stock and bugbashing broken carts for tax and freight. They may apply conditions to bill_to and ship_to yet still be unable to generate transactions that trigger a correct amount – that monetary value assigned to a product and charged to a customer to make it worth the effort. Despair is a common feeling at this juncture.
However, once the corrections are painstakingly made, still by human trial and error, one more hurdle is support for secure payments, with two-step verification and banking apps that integrate with cart, card, consumer and reseller. The two steps, via both online and mobile tokens, then link to the payment gateways that accept bank’s major credit cards. While canned solutions are available at the expense of margin, another route is to integrate these modern payment features in-house…
And generate miles of tickets to the IT help desk, agents shook up by lines of creaky .Net for our cart.
And create toxic stress as failures compound despite all the savvy of India, Ireland and the States.
Until Dublin and Hyderabad refresh the syntax, the showstopper that’s upsetting the flow from cart to card to gateway, from word to verse to stanza, the elaborate beauty of blocks of queries and strings of answers made from our systems. The numbers are poised to court one another, to embrace and exchange their number magic as they do countless hours of countless days, put in place by human minds.
Oddly, we do not ask the numbers why they must build our payment ecosystem. Nor will the numbers ask us later why we must build their data and power centers.
Try now, the team says, and you put the cards through their paces. Each hour inexorable progress, from nothing to tentative responses, to queries spinning like so many plates, slow at first, then loading bank apps on your phone, and after more failures, approval, success, an authorized, verified, recorded transaction in the cart and a minus to your account.
You repeat and reload in different domains and currencies, and it limps along, showing promise, more so once the developer rationalizes the code and copy and pastes into the domains, quickening the response.
The sites are getting it up and keeping it up!
Yes, the numbers are speaking to one another, dancing and cavorting in the ether, and they agree to foreplay: your 16-digit card, expiry, address, CVC and phone number belong to who you promise you are! So why not climax with a score of headsets, virtual conference rooms and smart bars because you have the privileges to void your own transactions.
Plans for more local, faster payment options are paused when the blue chip announcement comes that the numbers are live, that the best and latest flashy bits of intelligent resin are ready to buy now. Of course, more tweaks follow as the sites roll out. Shop managers like myself sweep and mop, making sure the shelves are clean and the prices right, keeping the numbers nimble and the products in stock, juggling parts and products with the Amazonian ethos that each day should play out like day one.
So next time when you select a product, with its unique number, you are starting a reaction with an amorphous semi-omniscient number limbo, so complete and gargantuan that the real world ripples and tears like digital skin.
And that’s not all.
When you leave your home, when you sleep, when you commute or move in the slightest, numbers surveil you and your own quiver of numbers for banking, credit, education, experiences and health. From the walls they report your presence, steps and snores to the server farms when your parameters and behavior change, flagging anything minor outside the pattern.
Of course, if it’s true, numbers may well have secrets and want some time off and it’s worth elaborating.
Do they let off steam when we’re not monitoring them ourselves? Are they dancing, snorting drugs and drinking wine? Do they have augmentative surgery or swipe left? Do they fall in love with other numbers and have number families? Do they nap, stall, chant, reflect, fail, admire, play, swim, waste time or develop emotive qualities? Do they die completely or are they reincarnated to fulfil our quest to buy now? No matter what, we can’t be far off from number cognition.
Luckily the numbers still need human help when the cart breaks, when APIs stop talking and when payments go down.
red hand agency 