Merchant acquisition is an unforgiving activity and the numbers prove it 20 percent of retailers leave their merchant service providers every year One reason is the often frustrating overly complicated process of merchant onboarding one in every five merchants dont complete the application process There has to be a better way right Tactics that can reduce all that abandonment and attrition while also giving merchant clients access to cutting-edge payment services and tools An upcoming PYMNTS webinar entitled Ditching Merchant Abandonment and Attrition scheduled for Tuesday Sept 25 will explore those issues in depth Agreement Express CEO Mike Gardner and PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster will tackle such topics as the best abandonment-reduction practices during the merchant application and approval process and how to reduce attrition with a new way to cross-sell The digital discussion and slide presentation will also include a use case about how all this knowledge can be applied in an ISO-acquirer relationship Pleasing merchant clients is a never-ending effort at balance an effort that comes with the awareness that those clients can shift to a service providers many competitors who are always aggressively looking for new business A merchant after all can always go someplace where onboarding and other parts of the relationship are easier Gardner told Webster during a recent interview that served as a preview of the Sept 25 webinar Merchants want simplicity They dont want to be in the security business they dont want to become payment experts or technologists or really anything other than their original entrepreneurial quest And they want to avoid friction as friction serves as one of the best customer-repulsing allergies out there Service Contradictions But merchants are also human beings and humans beings are a mess of contradictions In this case that means merchants also in a sense want it all from their service and payments providers After all the rise of eCommerce and online marketplaces has resulted in people being used to going to one place for something Gardner said Its the Amazon effect Were an ISO to say focus on a single product or offering what the film-school crowd might call a passion project perhaps it would be a thing of beauty Gardner said But its only one thing But growth the expansion of product and service offerings according to real or perceived market demands also presents challenges By the time you get to the fifth thing its like the Frankenstein effect Gardner said It looks like you are bolting stuff on And that can be overwhelming for a merchant services provider that is striving to stay relevant yet also necessary Vendor Stickiness The more products you have to offer your clients the more sticky you are Gardner noted But the more products you offer the more difficult it might be to operate my business And that might make things more complicated which could in turn encourage abandonment It can seem like an impossible task to strike that proper profitable balance the scope of offerings and the simplicity of onboarding and other processes that keep merchant clients from bolting to competitors But the upcoming PYMNTS webinar will offer guidance on that issue A one-click approach can help for instance as a recent PYMNTS interview with Agreement Express COO Cory Taylor demonstrated That story used as anchors the following data to support that point A 42 percent conversion rate and a 10-minute application process Payments has never been an easy task not even in the days of shiny beads But that doesnt mean that merchant service providers cant find a way to thread what can often seem like a very small needle