In a previously published series of posts we have covered a set of basic features to be considered by merchants and resellers as online payment gateway selection criteria. Posts concerning these fundamental features can be found in Payment Gateway series on our web-site.
Although needs of most merchants and resellers are confined to the features discussed so far, enterprise merchants, wholesale resellers, independent sales organizations (ISO) and payment service providers (PSP) occasionally face some challenges induced by their size and specifics of their business. For the benefit of these groups of players, we have decided to write another series of articles covering the so-called advanced enterprise-level payment gateway features. In the current series we will offer a review of advanced features (which are sometimes no less important than basic ones) to be considered when choosing a credit card processor or online payment gateway provider.
In the installments concerning basic online payment gateway features we have considered merchant and reseller perspectives separately for illustrative purposes. In contrast to basic features, where the two specified perspectives could be clearly defined and understood, enterprise features tend to apply to both resellers and enterprise merchants in the similar way. The only thing for resellers to keep in mind is that a reseller must always strive to select a processor\online payment gateway, capable of supporting the set of features, satisfying all current and potential needs of merchants this reseller is dealing with.
Consequently, in our subsequent posts we are going to look at all of the above-mentioned players from a single perspective. In either case, we will try to supplement the concept explanation with a meaningful example from the industry.
Particularly, this series will look into the following advanced online payment gateway features:
- Ability to support surcharges (such as convenience fees and taxes);
- Support for batch transaction processing (especially if there is a need to do recurring billing\process large files);
- Support of ACH transactions through unified ACH\CC API;
- Blacklist capability of “never-to-be-active” accounts;
- Availability of various types of recurring billing schedules;
- Support for tokenization and hosted paypages (to reduce PCI scope);
- Built-in merchant on-boarding and merchant account provisioning mechanism (to automate the merchant data collection process);
- Enterprise reporting for advanced reconciliation;
- Payment aggregation and remittance for PSPs;
- Credit card BIN and “business intelligence” (to allow businesses to gain extra-knowledge about their customers).
All aforementioned topics (and more) will be covered in subsequent articles, so stay tuned and wait for new installments to appear.