The Ultimate Integrated Payment Solutions Guide for ISVs
Independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers have a lot on their plate when it comes to anticipating their clients’ needs. Everything from onboarding processes to regulatory compliance requires careful attention, meaning less obvious details can occasionally fall through the cracks.
One area of development that deserves more consideration from ISVs is the use of integrated payment solutions. At its core, integrated payments enable your clients to accept and reconcile payments within their interface, thereby automating their payment processing and reporting system.
Merchants benefit from a PCI compliant solution, improved efficiency, and heightened security protocol, while customers enjoy a safe, secure, and streamlined experience throughout their entire buying journey. ISVs benefit from payment integration as well with new opportunities in revenue generation and improved customer retention.
What Are Integrated Payments?
Integrated payments refer to payment processing systems embedded within a specific software application. This feature allows end users to make purchases within the software solution itself, rather than exiting the platform to complete their sale through a third-party processing company.
By adding this functionality to your product, you enable your merchants to process, reconcile, and record payments directly within your software solution-without the need to overhaul an entire IT department.
How Do Integrated Payments Work?
The way it works is simple: a customer enters their credit card information directly into your software solution, the integration technology processes the payment and automatically records the payment information. This delivers a seamless user experience and alleviates many administrative burdens faced by merchants on a daily basis.
This is especially beneficial in certain industries. For medical professionals, for example, the right integrated payment solution can help track patients’ appointment and medical history and streamline patient appointment reminders all in one.
Why Do ISVs Need Integrated Payment Solutions?
ISVs are focused on developing software solutions that streamline their merchants’ business operations and optimize the user experience. Out of all the value-added products and services available to explore within coding opportunities, embedded commerce might not be at the top of a developer’s priority list — although it should be.
Why? Because not only do integrated payment solutions improve your merchants’ internal processes and their customers’ overall satisfaction, but they also introduce a new source of revenue that ISVs can (and should) cash in on.
What Are the Benefits of Integrated Payments?
Creating software with an integrated payment system is a win-win-win for you, your merchants, and their customers. Let’s take a look at several distinct benefits that make integrated technology well worth your consideration.
How Integrated Payments Benefit End Users
Seamless User Experience
Say, for example, you’ve sold software to an e-commerce site and they have a customer ready to purchase the items in their cart. With embedded commerce functionality, this shopper would be able to head to checkout, enter his or her personal information, and complete the sale-all on one page.
However, if the payment system were non-integrated, the customer would be directed to a payment gateway (such as PayPal) where they’d be required to submit their payment data to a third-party site before being redirected once more back to the merchant’s page.
This results in a disjointed, time-consuming user experience that could interfere with a customer’s purchasing decision and could ultimately cause the merchant to lose out on business and seek other solutions that currently offer integrated payment processing.
Improved Security
Data security is a huge threat in today’s digital age, but every time a merchant directs a user away from their secure site and toward a third-party processor, they jeopardize their customer’s sensitive information.
Integrated payments enhance the protection of personal data through use of tokenization, which ensures that sensitive elements, such as cardholder information, are substituted with non-sensitive equivalents carrying no exploitable value.
Improved security measures, such as meeting PCI compliance requirements, benefit both your merchants as well as their customers. This is especially important when you consider that the average cost of just one compromised record costs $277 in the U.S., potentially resulting in a data breach so costly that it puts a merchant out of business altogether.
How Integrated Payments Benefit Merchants
ISVs who offer integrated payments can provide a complete business solution that better satisfies their merchants’ needs. Typically, merchants are so focused on receiving payments they hardly think about the time wasted on reconciling invoices, recording transactions into accounting software, and balancing financial ledgers.
Embedded commerce streamlines small business accounting processes by automatically transferring batch information into their existing ERP system or accounting software-without the need to manually transcribe every detail of every transaction.
Increased Speed and Efficiency
Manual accounting is tedious and requires meticulous attention to detail. Payment processing, in particular, can be especially overwhelming because it usually involves balancing paper ledgers and invoices by hand or by data entry. An occasional human error is unavoidable but, once discovered, these simple mistakes can take months to reconcile and rebalance the books. Integrated payments solutions relieve the burden of manually entering data for merchants, as payment records are entered automatically into the software.
Payment integration can also help merchants get paid faster and avoid leaving payments unprocessed months after the transaction was made. Considering that 9 out of 10 businesses fail due to poor cash flow, integrated payments solutions can help merchants ensure they’ll be around next year.
Recovered Time Management
By simplifying the point of sale and automating accounting processes, merchants recover one of the most precious resources a business has: time. Can you imagine what you could accomplish with an extra 30 minutes every day? They can apply their new free time to managing relationships with customers, exploring innovation opportunities, or driving business growth.
How Integrated Payments Benefit ISVs
Anticipate Client Needs
At the rate technology is unfolding, it’s almost impossible for ISVs to keep up with “the next big thing” in payment trends. Integrated payments have the ability to adapt to sudden market demands (such as new mobile solutions, digital wallets, wearable payments, NFC chips, and EMV contactless transactions), making integrated tools all the more appealing.
With a payment processing partner like Global Payments Integrated, ISVs can anticipate the future needs of their clients with frictionless integration built directly into their software platform.
Generate Revenue
By adding a payment API to their software, ISVs can embrace partnership opportunities and boost business revenue through revenue sharing. ISVs have the potential to earn a percentage of the revenue generated through transaction fees that would have otherwise been paid to third-party processors to complete a sale.
Adds to Bottom Line
Making more money and generating new sources of revenue should be at the forefront of any business owner’s mind. Integrated payments not only contribute to incremental revenue growth but also improve customer acquisition and retention by delivering in-demand functionality all in one, comprehensive interface.
Increases Valuation
Most ISVs know that the magic formula for success lies in the ability to grow and scale your business, explore new coding opportunities, and find innovative ways to set your software apart from the competition. With new revenue streams from credit card processing, achieving these can become a reality that could set off a domino effect, giving your brand the recognition and your business the boost it needs to create the next best software solution.
Learn more about the partner-based benefits of integrated payments.
Conclusion
Ultimately, integrated payments create a seamless and secure checkout process for the customer, allowing you to provide a better product for your clients. When you partner with Global Payments Integrated, the integrated payments division of Global Payments, you benefit from secure and personalized integrated payment solutions that improve your merchant relationships.
Backed with our sales, marketing, and management resources, as well as a dedicated team of technical support, Global Payments Integrated enhances all facets of business for the ISVs who take advantage of our suite of innovative software solutions.
Contact us to see how we can help build your brand value and grow your customer base by simplifying how payments are processed.
Originally published at https://www.globalpaymentsintegrated.com.
