Why Merchants Save Their Best Offers for Checkout

Merchants employ diverse tactics to attract buyers with promotional offers, yet struggle to present the appropriate incentive to the ideal consumer before a purchase can be influenced. This gap is evident in "The Smart Basket Opportunity: How Merchants Can Capture More Consumer Spending," a July 2026 report by PYMNTS Intelligence in partnership with FIS.

Conducted via a survey of 60 grocery, retail, and restaurant and food service merchants, the research reveals that 65% cite access to data as the primary barrier to running personalized promotions, despite many merchants perceiving their data capabilities as advanced. While 73% of merchants utilize personalized or targeted offers, only 48% consider them their most successful promotional mechanism, highlighting a discrepancy between deployment and success rates.

A potential solution lies in implementing smart checkout offers, which analyze a shopper's basket in real-time at the point of sale, automatically applying eligible product-level offers, loyalty rewards, and brand-funded incentives without requiring shoppers to activate them beforehand. This method aligns with existing merchant practices, with checkout-integrated promotions being the most commonly employed promotional channel among surveyed merchants at 58%.

Furthermore, merchants plan to allocate more budget to embedded, real-time checkout optimization in the next three years, reflecting a growing trend toward this approach. Merchants desire control over promotional construction and seek to protect margins, gain visibility into incremental sales or ROI, and establish data usage rules.

Additionally, 77% are willing to share transaction signals and performance data with payment platforms, provided they receive clear evidence of resulting sales or conversions and transparency into how their information is utilized.