Simplifying Payment Processes
If you work in an industry that needs to stay flexible to keep up with the competition, card payment processing is very important. Interested in learning why? Read this guide.
What’s the State of Your Payment Processing?
The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to take stock of your current card payment processing model. Reflect on what works well with your existing system and what needs to be improved. Ask yourself questions like:
- Are you satisfied with your approval rates?
- Is your processing system as available as it should be?
- What capabilities are missing from your credit card transaction processing?
- Have you been continuously achieving PCI compliance?
Answering these questions will help you better understand the state of your card payment processing. If you realize that there’s serious room for improvement, it may be time to streamline your credit card processing model.
What Makes Streamlining Card Payment Processing Important
The importance of excellent card payment processing cannot be overstated. Payments are the lifeblood of every business—ensuring their consistent delivery is key to your success. Whether we’re describing dynamic payment routing or enhanced security features, there is no shortage of benefits to improving your credit card processing. Some of these include:
Save Time
Improved card payment processing models will save your business huge amounts of time by implementing advanced payment routing techniques. These techniques use the most efficient path to transmit your payment data, meaning that you’ll encounter less errors in the payment routing process, and cut down on time wasted repeating transactions.
Enhancements to your payment system will help automate all card transactions. Whether you’re dealing with direct card usage or card-not-present transactions, streamlining your card payment processing makes these processes much faster, letting your business focus on serving the customer.
Increase Transaction Approval
Many transactions fail to get processed due to technical issues. A minor processing bug could lead to dozens of failed transactions that cost thousands in opportunity costs. Instead of letting one hitch in your current payment routing system entirely derail your transactions, consider investing in dynamic payment routing. Dynamic payment routing will ensure that your organization is resistant to transaction issues, saving you from missing out on potential revenue and enhancing your customers’ overall experience.
Want to Make Sure Your Transactions Get Approved?
Reduce Friction
Modern merchant success hinges on preventing user journey dropouts and keeping the potential customer focused throughout the payment process. An improved payment platform can create a friction-free user experience by offering a customizable interface that adapts to the user’s journey.
Not only does this kind of payment platform improve the overall user experience, but it also uses state-of-the-art anti-fraud software techniques to reduce false positives. The last thing you want is to be forced to deny an enthusiastic customer because of a misleading false positive. While this obviously impacts that specific transaction, it makes that customer less likely to buy from you moving forward, potentially impacting your business in the long term.
Simplify PCI Compliance
PCI compliance is mandatory for every business that accepts credit cards, even if you handle just a few card transactions annually. Failing to abide by the PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) could lead to your business facing severe consequences, including:
- Fines
- Legal Penalties
- Damaged Merchant Relationships
- Forced Business Shutdown
- Consumer Lawsuits
PCI compliance is based on meeting specific security standards with card holder data. The best way to meet those standards? Adjust your credit card transaction processing approach. Don’t leave compliance up to chance—use an all-encompassing security solution to make compliance easy.
Improve Redundancy
Does your business rely on a sole acquirer to facilitate your transactions? If so, your payment processing system is at risk. All it takes is one payment outage for your company to lose control of your entire payment infrastructure. Losing control of your payment infrastructure translates into lost business, unhappy customers, and a diminished competitive edge.
Avoid this by transitioning into a payment platform that allows multiple payment options through a single API. This system allows customers to be rerouted on the fly, even when a transaction initially fails. This keeps the payment process seamless and minimizes customer dropouts, meaning that you’ll have more successful transactions and boosted revenue.
Improve Ease of Use
Our increasingly globalized society has led to cross-border payments being a constant for most large businesses, especially if you work in an industry like hospitality, travel, or real estate. However, onboarding payment gateways for these international companies can be a headache. The best way to simplify new payment provider onboarding is by adjusting your payment model. A sophisticated model quickly handles the onboarding of new payment providers out-of-the-box, with minimal merchant involvement.
This model makes it extremely easy for a company to add new payment service providers and adjust to customers’ expectations. Overall, a unified payment model lets a merchant stay competitive and creates a more seamless payment process for merchant accounts and customers.
Support Cross Border Payment and Currencies
Does your business work in the cloud—offering your services to different customers in different countries? If so, you might find it challenging to find a single payment processor that can support all countries, currencies and payment forms. In addition, you will see your transaction fees on international transactions increase substantially.
Avoid this by utilizing a payment platform that supports multiple payment processors with one access point. Design your system to use a payment processor that is local to the location of the transaction, can support the currency of the transaction or can offer you the best rate.
Automate Payment Processes
Automation is the future. This is especially true in regards to payment processing. An advanced payment platform can keep a transaction moving automatically through every scenario, whether it needs to alter a payment route mid journey, handle payment reconciliation, or deal with refunds, chargebacks, and more.
Reconciliation can drain an enormous amount of time and resources. If you’re sick of losing time to the reconciliation process, streamline your card transaction processing with automation.
The Consequences of Inefficient Credit Card Transaction Processing
Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of streamlining your credit card payment processing, let’s analyze the consequences of an inefficient system.
Stunted Growth
The main consequence of inefficient credit card transaction processing is that it will stunt your business’s growth. Poor card systems hurt your business’s development for many reasons. They:
- Hurt your sales
- Lead to unsatisfied customers
- Make it challenging to grow in new markets
- Lower adaptive ability
None of these factors may seem serious in isolation, but they can be catastrophic when put together.
Lowered Sales
Poor payment processes will lead to a drop in sales, especially if your business does a large amount of card-not-present transactions. Online customers are incredibly flaky. All it takes is one hitch in the payment process for them to abandon their transaction. In fact, e-commerce brands lose $18 billion in sales each year due to last-second cart abandonment.
Don’t give your customers a chance to second-guess their decision. Keep the shopping and payment process seamless by upgrading your payment processing.
Poor International Sales
Does your business deal with a large number of international transactions? If so, you understand the importance of quick adaptation to new payment gateways and systems. Businesses that deal with many international clients must be flexible with their payment methods. Failing to be flexible will lead to clients choosing to work with other businesses that will accommodate them instead of grappling with your inflexible systems.
Upgrade Your Card Payment Processing Today With PCI Booking
Whether you want to optimize your payment routing, increase cardholder data security, or are worried about meeting PCI compliance, we can help. PCI Booking’s expert team of developers can customize solutions to meet your business’s specific needs. Between our all-encompassing PCI Shield offering and the more selective Orchestra option, you can’t go wrong. Contact us today to revolutionize your payment processes.