1. Minimize PCI compliance expenses
Maintaining and validating PCI compliance is an expensive and time-consuming effort for most merchants. Merchants can reduce their PCI compliance burden by using a hosted checkout or payment page through their payment gateway for the collection and processing of sensitive information. In this scenario, an online customer is transparently transferred to a hosted payment page for checkout. The hosted page can be framed on the merchant’s website so it has the same appearance as the merchant’s website and provides a consistent customer experience. However, the hosted checkout is not part of the merchant’s data environment, and thus is not in scope for its PCI compliance requirements. The merchant avoids contact with sensitive payment information at all, and therefore has minimal requirements for PCI compliance.
2. Reduce the occurrence of fraudulent transactions
Merchants doing business online are exposed to significantly higher fraud risk and costly chargebacks. In fact, it is estimated that fraud losses are more than 16 times higher for card-not-present transactions than for conventional transactions. Because it is much more difficult to validate a shopper’s true identity in an online transaction, fraudsters frequently take advantage of eCommerce merchants to monetize credit card data that has been illegally obtained. Merchants often employ pro-active order screening to prevent fraud, but utilizing only one or two points of logic (e.g., rejecting orders simply based on dollar threshold or address verification results) will rarely identify fraud attempts accurately, causing overabundant review efforts and potential “false positives.”
3. Decrease interchange fees
Corporations are increasingly taking advantage of online channels for procurement purposes, and the use of purchase cards and corporate credit cards is expanding rapidly as a result. eCommerce retailers can benefit from the lower interchange fees associated with business-to-business (B2B) card transactions—however, to qualify for reduced interchange rates for these transactions, they must capture and transmit additional data (known as Level III data) such as line items, product codes, item descriptions, unit price, unit quantities, and ship-to postal data.
4. Use data more intelligently
One important advantage that online businesses have over traditional brick-and-mortar stores is an enhanced ability to collect and analyze detailed customer information about everything from cart abandonment to promotional effectiveness to average ticket size by demographic. With such large volumes of purchase data running through eCommerce sites every day, the challenge is how to cost-effectively access and analyze the data to extract useful insights. Real-time access to data analytics, as well as detailed reporting, benchmarking tools and chargeback tools, is essential
to maximizing success online.
5. Stop managing multiple eCommerce vendors
There is a great deal of complexity that comes with operating a profitable online retail business, especially one that spans across international borders or also includes a brick-and-mortar operation. The payment acceptance function alone can comprise managing payment processors, eCommerce gateways, alternative payment services, fraud solutions providers, global acquirers, and data security experts.
In order to gain operational efficiencies and reduce the resources required to manage so many suppliers, it may be beneficial to consider consolidating certain payment-related services and processes with a single vendor. Doing so can have many advantages, including simplified access to technical support services, unified reporting, easier integration of ancillary functionalities, optimized interchange costs, volume discounts, and a single point of contact and user interface.
Inspire Commerce can handle your credit card processing and payment gateway services. Get in touch with and find out how we can support your business.
