Payment processing is an ever-evolving industry. Change happens fast. That's why keeping up-to-date on all that is going on with payments is important. This blog is designed to help you do just that.
Filled with articles about the latest developments in payment processing and stories about businesses that have implemented more efficient and cost-effective ways to process payments, we're here to ensure you never miss a thing. You'll also meet the people and companies at the forefront of what's happening right now in the industry. Their success is something from which everyone can learn, whether you are a merchant, a developer or a payment service organization.
Also, be on the lookout for advice and tips on how to make the payment process better meet your particular needs!
We're inviting everyone to post comments to this blog, give suggestions, offer advice and ask questions. We want this to be an interactive tool that readers will want to access again and again.
So join the conversation. Let's all make this a forum in which everyone can share and benefit. Let's talk payments.
Penny Townsend
We're going to level with you (all puns intended): Discussing credit card processing levels can be a pain. Like so much about credit card fees, it's a mystery to many.
Penny Townsend
The explosive growth of e-commerce and digital transactions has made the demand for efficient and secure online payment options a must for businesses wanting to stay competitive. Most business, are also continually looking for ways to enhance offerings and provide better value to their clients.
Penny Townsend
If you want to accept electronic payments, you've got to learn the ABCs of Payment APIs. Presenting a basic understanding of this vital component of commerce software integration.
Penny Townsend
Qualpay Account Updater ensures your customers' credit card information is always up-to-date. Customer credit card data changes and changes frequently. Card expirations, data breaches, and fraud detection are all situations that can result in credit card data changing without a merchant realizing it.
Penny Townsend
What are the three basic elements that make up the cost of a credit card transaction?The following three elements comprise the payment a business makes in accepting a credit card sale and processing it.
Penny Townsend
A merchant account is a specialized type of commercial bank account that allows businesses to accept payments via credit or debit cards as well as other electronic payment methods.
Penny Townsend
In today's competitive market, home heating oil, propane, and gas suppliers are looking for ways to optimize operations and reduce costs. One area where substantial savings can be achieved is in credit card processing fees.
Penny Townsend
It's a question we at Qualpay get from businesses all the time. (If we had a dollar for every time we've been asked this, we'd be able to buy a small condo—but not in the Bay Area. Maybe Texas.)
Penny Townsend
It's a question many businesses face these days. Should a company begin accepting credit cards in addition to the payment methods it has been using for years, like, for example, paper checks?
Penny Townsend
When it comes to designing your website, it's crucial that you make your checkout page as convenient, simple, and seamless to navigate as possible for your customers. After all, the checkout page is where the rubber meets the road, you might say. That is, it's where customers ultimately decide to buy what you are selling.
Penny Townsend
Visa recently revised and updated its evidence requirements necessary for merchants to challenge so-called “friendly fraud” dispute
Penny Townsend
That is the question. But the answer isn't simple.
Yes, a surcharge can help you recoup some of the expenses associated with accepting credit cards for payment. But this must be weighed against how this cost passed on to your customers will make them react.
Penny Townsend
You have a business to run. And nothing is more important than ensuring you do all you can to keep that business growing and operating as best as possible.
So if you are having issues with your payments provider—or you think you are not getting the optimum service you desire—you should not wait to look for another provider.
Penny Townsend
After delaying interchange fee increases because of the COVID pandemic, and amidst rising costs, the credit card brands are once again raising fees.
For Fuel Marketers, Visa consumer-qualified credit card interchange rates increased by about 0.10% on average from April 2022. Meanwhile, MasterCard is increasing the interchange rate of its Consumer, Consumer Rewards and Consumer Enhanced Utility programs by $0.10. These rates are the most likely to impact Fuel Marketers the most.
Penny Townsend
Demand the best support.
Every business understands the importance of maintaining and receiving exceptional service, starting with excellent customer service, which creates essential value to your company and product while helping you to retain customers
Penny Townsend
Don't blame yourself.
Many merchants know the feeling—matching credit card transactions from the initial customer sale to the final deposit in one's bank account can be very confusing. It can also get quite time-consuming. You might say it's enough to give any merchant the blues. Or even make one red with anger
Penny Townsend
Like most merchants today, you are no doubt quite familiar with cell phone payment apps. These are apps like PayPal, Google Pay and Venmo that allow your customers to pay for your products and services right from their mobile devices.
The ease and convenience of these apps have made them quite popular. But more recently there has been another cell phone payment option that is fast gaining favor among American consumers. It's called text-to-pay.
Penny Townsend
They say habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into but oh so hard to get out of. As the world emerges from the pandemic, the conversation has turned to the dramatic shifts to consumer preferences and behavioral habits and whether we'll see things revert to pre-pandemic norms or are we destined to remain in our proverbial comfy beds and accelerate further into these new consumer practices.
Penny Townsend
We swear—Qualpay's real-time reconciliation reporting makes tracking credit card transactions a whole lot easier.
If you are a merchant, you know how complicated and tedious it can be to match the records of credit card purchases with the final deposits in your banking account.
Penny Townsend
Are you storing customer payment data for subsequent payments? Then this service is an important benefit for both you and your customers.
Has this ever happened to you? A customer's payment card purchase is declined because they have been issued a new payment card, only you haven't been informed of this? Or a payment doesn't go through because the card expiration date has changed, but you have the old date on file?
Penny Townsend
ACH electronic transfers offer merchants a lot of advantages. And consumers are increasingly choosing ACH to make payments.
You are probably already familiar with ACH payments, whether you realize it or not. Is your paycheck directly deposited into your bank account? That's thanks to ACH. Or do you have your mortgage or car loan or any other recurring bill paid from your checking or savings account automatically at the end of the month? That, too, is ACH at work.
Penny Townsend
Cash actually has hidden—and sometimes not so hidden—costs associated with it.
We all understand that there are costs associated with accepting credit cards, from processing fees to those dreaded chargebacks. But what many merchants might not realize is the same holds true for cash transactions. There are costs involved with handling cash, and some of these costs can be quite substantial.
Penny Townsend
The move toward a cashless society has gained even more momentum during the coronavirus crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on seemingly every area of our lives. That includes the way Americans prefer to make consumer purchases, pay for lunch at a socially-distant friendly restaurant, and pay bills. More and more we are opting to use credit cards instead of cash.
Ann Joyce
The Why, the Rules, and Best Practices of Subscription Payments.
Subscriptions have become an everyday part of life for many people and even more so in these COVID times. From monthly clothes boxes, to dog food treats, vitamins and beauty supplies, subscriptions come in all shapes and sizes.
So what do you need to be concerned with, while you are growing your business?
Penny Townsend
Why Sales And Deposits Don't Match?
Merchants often have trouble tracking credit card transactions through to cash in their Bank. This becomes incredibly confusing as you start to layer in more than one sales channel, which typically will require different vendors, to the ones already in use.
The complexity of multiple vendors, the associated logins, and receiving one daily deposit for a group of transactions, leaves merchants with the challenging task of trying to match which payment is in what deposit.
Jon Gilbert
What does it mean?
When a customer buys a new $25 t-shirt using their credit card, the bank that issued the card (Issuing Bank) funds $25 to the t-shirt store through the credit card processor that the merchant uses (Acquiring Bank).
Interchange refers to the schedule of fees paid by the merchant for the convenience of accepting credit cards.
Penny Townsend
An extra security measure that pays off in numerous ways.
Providing your customers with a simple and convenient way to make online purchases is of course essential in today's ever-expanding eCommerce marketplace.
But just as important is ensuring that the credit card information your customers provide during the payment process is as safely protected from bad actors as possible. That's where tokenization technology comes in.
Penny Townsend
Take steps to protect both your business and the impacted cardholders
If you suspect that you are a victim of a carding attack, the first thing you should do is notify your Merchant Account provider right away, as well as your Payment Gateway.
Penny Townsend
How to Thrive in an Online World
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive consumers indoors and online, SMBs are quickly learning that they can no longer rely on physical payment methods to keep the cash flowing. Whether by desire or necessity, consumers are moving their spending online - and they may never look back.
Penny Townsend
The sooner you understand it, the sooner you can fight it.
Carding is a form of credit card fraud in which a stolen credit card is used to purchase goods and services or to acquire bitcoin, prepaid or store-branded gift cards. In the case of prepaid gift cards, they are then sold to others or are used to buy products that can be sold for cash.
Ann Joyce
The best defense against chargebacks and lost revenue, is ALWAYS delivering quality customer support.
As we hunker in our sweatpants, logging in for our day's work from the spare bedroom, let's talk about some of the realities and new challenges of the COVID-19 virus and chargebacks.
Lisa Anderson
Use Account Updater to keep cardholder data fresh.
What happens when a customer doesn't tell you that their card information has changed?
If a merchant tries to complete a transaction with an expired card, or the credit number has changed, the transaction will be declined, and the merchant must still pay an authorization fee, with no associated revenue.
Loriann Ouimet
On January 1st a new law went into effect in California that represents the first comprehensive consumer online data privacy legislation in the United States.
Under the CCPA, California residents have the right to know what information businesses are collecting about them as well as whether this information is being sold or disclosed to other parties.
The time to prepare for it is now.
Penny Townsend
Why Businesses Should Connect Directly to an Integrated Payments Provider
If you are in a business that requires software it is likely that you work with an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), who probably has partnerships with a variety of vendors that handle separate components of the payment process.
With a single, integrated payments solution, you can go directly to just one vendor and save yourself the potential problems inherent in relying on multiple independent vendors.
Lisa Anderson
It was definitely the right solution for our Partner ExaVault.
The ACH Network is now one of the largest, safest and most reliable payment systems in the USA, creating value and enabling innovation for all participants.
If you are debating whether to add ACH as an option, read on and learn how adding ACH helped ExaVault save time and resources.
Todd Troutman
Adding the Cloudflare service to your WordPress site adds security and performance options for very little effort. A Content Distribution Network (CDN) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection become available to you for as little as the effort it takes you to configure it (ie: $0). A Web Application Firewall (WAF) can be added for a starting price of $20/month.
Rob Cascella
A couple months ago, I noticed a new feature in my AWS Application Load Balancer configurator: Authenticate.
I didn't think much about it until a few weeks later, when I casually suggested to my teammate that he just authenticate at the load balancer to secure a service he was setting up. "What do you mean 'authenticate at the load balancer'?" he asked me. Oh. Yea. Huh. What DO I mean "authenticate at the load balancer?"
Todd Troutman
A while back, one of our remote offices had trouble reaching our web application. The DNS result for our CDN was taking our users on a terrible route with a high amount of packet loss.
Performing DNS lookups against different resolvers around the world produced different -- better! -- results than Google's resolvers for our CDN provider.
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