Your Top 3 Pain Points of Payment Processing and How to Solve Them

In today’s market, consumers expect electronic payment options from their vendors. After all, e-payments offer them real-time flexibility and require less effort than paper payments. In turn, most businesses want to offer their customers electronic payment options, but they often run into problems with disconnected systems, security, and cost. To help, we’ve broken down these top three pain points of payment processing and the ways you can alleviate them. 

Problem #1: Disconnected Systems

Chances are you have multiple avenues for collecting payments from your customers:

• Customer service reps out in the field or taking orders over the phone
• An accounting team that collects payments on open invoices and recurring bills 
• Counter sales to customers who come into your place of business  
• A website where customers purchase products and services online

Usually, each of these channels runs on a different software application (SalesPad by Cavallo, an accounting system, a webstore, and so on). Without the right tools to connect them, companies often end up processing credit cards in one system and then manually entering that payment data into their other systems, creating inefficiencies and errors. 

Solution: Integration

Instead of offering you a “quick-fix” payment tool that forces you to change your daily process in order to accommodate it, a good payment provider should help you integrate payment processing into your business applications. A single payment processing platform that connects to every application will create a seamless sales cycle for your customers, save you time, and reduce the risk of human error.

Start by creating a list of all the different avenues by which you want to accept credit cards. Then provide this list to your current and potential payment providers to see how they can help. 

Problem #2: Security

Every merchant who processes credit card data must abide by the rules of the PCI Security Standards Council. The PCI Council looks into many factors related to the security of credit card information, including how businesses collect credit card numbers and where they store them. Achieving and maintaining PCI compliance can be difficult for merchants because of the IT required to store payment data in-house using PCI-compliant methods.

Solution: Cloud Storage

Moving away from locally stored credit card data can significantly reduce the IT resources you need to secure data and maintain PCI compliance. Instead, companies can use tokenization technology to store only a tokenized payment record within their database and store the actual credit card data in the cloud. (Just be sure the vendor you are using for tokenization and cloud storage is PCI-certified.) 

Problem #3: Cost

Every credit card processed will incur a processing fee by the associated card brand and bank. Steep fees may discourage businesses from accepting many credit card transactions. 

Unfortunately, processing fees are just part of the payment territory, but there are some things you can do to make sure you are getting the lowest possible rates. 

Solution: Level 2 and 3 Data Processing

Card brands like Visa and Mastercard want to ensure that the credit card transactions a merchant is processing are not fraudulent. Card brands encourage merchants to provide extra data about the credit card transaction (such as line-item details and billing address), because the more data provided, the less likely the transaction is fraudulent. Therefore, the card brands will offer lower processing rates as an incentive for providing this extra information that they call “level 2 and 3 data.” 

As a merchant, you can speak with your payment provider about qualifying for level 2 and 3 data processing and how it can affect your transaction fees. 

How PayFabric Can Help 

SalesPad employs PayFabric, a cloud-based payment processing platform and storage hub, to integrate payment processing directly into your SalesPad platform. Instead of requiring a separate portal or terminal to accept payments, PayFabric lets you stay within SalesPad (or other business applications) when it’s time to run a credit card transaction. PayFabric will also centralize the stored payment data from each of your applications, creating a seamless AR process.

PayFabric’s iframe technology lets users process transactions directly from within any application, but the data is actually being stored in its PCI Level 1-compliant cloud. This method gives companies the convenience of integrated payment processing without the risk of locally stored data.

Finally, SalesPad customers are seeing between 15% and 35% savings in their monthly credit card processing fees by switching to PayFabric services, which include Level 2 and 3 data processing.

To see how PayFabric integrates with SalesPad, check out this demo video. If you are interested in learning more about how SalesPad and PayFabric can alleviate the hassles of credit card processing, contact us.

This article was written by EVO Payments, a Cavallo® partner.