From credit cards to technologies like digital wallets and real-time bank transfers, these days consumers have a wide choice when it comes to paying online. Moreover, offering a range of locally preferred payment methods is part of delivering a great customer experience. That’s why payment processing technology supporting customers’ preferred payment methods is vital to online merchants everywhere.
If you’re going to pay or accept payments online, then you’ll need three key pieces of software. Moreover, these three pieces work together; if one is missing, the entire system will stop working. These three key pieces are:
Payment Processor
The payment processor handles the card transaction by transmitting information from the customer’s credit/debit card to the receiver’s and customer’s bank. Moreover, payment processors deal with issues like credit card validity, security, card limits, etc. If buyers have sufficient balance in their account, the transaction will be rectifying, and the payment will go through.
Payment Gateway
It is an essential online version of a point-of-sale device. This helps to connect your website and the payment processor. Furthermore, this can help connect your merchant account with credit/debit card issuers. However, the payment gateway manages the technical side of the transaction. And this ensures that you’ll be able to receive your customers’ payments.
Merchant account
A specific type of bank account enables your business to accept online payments. Moreover, there’s nowhere for the money that customers have transferred to you to go if there is no merchant account. However, if you won’t have direct access to the account itself, then funds from your merchant account will be automatically handed over to your business bank account within one or two working days.
How Online Payment Processing Works
The process of an online payment probably like simple to consumers as they shop, but different steps have to go on behind the visuals:
- Customer selects payment mode.
- It is encrypted, via a payment gateway technology, and sent to the payment processor for further process.
- The sale is authorized
- The transaction is approved by the card issuer, bank, or digital wallet.
- Payments are sent to the merchant’s bank, less the payment processing fees.
How Cross-Border Payment Processing Works
While it is understood international sales are important for business growth. The actual process of cross-border payments is something that not all merchants feel confident about. Dealing in different countries means that payments will be received in multiple currencies. Those payments need to be exchanged.
Moreover, buyers across the world usually have their preferred payment methods, depending on what is most common or even just what’s available in their particular location. Understanding the preferred local payment, where you’re selling is important, as is being able to process a full range of local payment methods.
Online Payment Processing Fees
It’s important to be aware of the fees involved in offering online payments, which can include the following:
- The fee charged by the debit card provider.
- The fee charged by the payment method provider.
- The fee charged by the credit card issuer/provider.
- Merchant’s bank charges.
- The authorization fee.
Add Payment Processing to Your Website
You need to add payment processing to your website, to be able to accept payments from online customers and there are different ways this can be done:
- API Integration
- Pre-Built Hosted Checkout
- eCommerce Platform Plugins
- Digital Invoicing
These online Payment Processing solutions make it easier for you to accept cross-border payments, helping your business to expand wherever you want it to grow. However, it might seem like a relatively simple process, but accepting payments online is a complex process that requires many different parts to work in harmony together.
TCI is the organization where you can get solutions to every problem related to API integration and help you to maintain your customer data easily. Moreover, we have a team that specializes in MuleSoft and Salesforce Implementations. By MuleSoft, we can integrate the API and set the payment gateway, and by Salesforce, track your customer and help you to grow your business better.
