Is your payment gateway doing enough?

After you've integrated a payment gateway and shopping cart into your eCommerce store, it may appear that your payment gateway can be left to its own devices and do its own thing: happily ticking along in the background of your business operations, processing transactions, and authorizing customer card details. However, this is insufficient.

Take a step forward three years.

Your company has grown, and so has the number of people who do business on your website. Unfortunately, one thing that hasn't changed for the better is your payment gateway, which is still operational but not contributing to business growth.

A gateway that does not keep up with your growing business or its changing needs can really stifle your sales.

But how do you know if your payment gateway integration is flexible and powerful enough to meet the needs of your business now and in the future? There is no simple answer to this question because a great payment system combines many features such as payment options, card security, anti-fraud tools, integration, and performance.

Continue reading to find out if your payment gateway is up to par!

Payment gateway features you cannot compromise on

When deciding on a payment gateway, no single feature can be a clear winner. However, some characteristics are more important than others:

Customers prefer speed: Making payments as soon as possible is a priority. When it comes to online payments, shoppers have a low tolerance for delays.

Sophistication is important: Disbursements, batch payments, and refunds are time-saving features that work to create a more sophisticated shopping and customer experience.

Putting the power in the hands of the buyers: Merchants must be able to accept payments via their app. As a result, your gateway should be able to integrate with a flexible mobile SDK solution for both iOS and Android as a standard.

An online payment gateway that encourages growth allows you to access over 100 payment collection options online. Digital wallets, for example, could be included. The following is a list of Asia-Pacific payment options.

Know the payment card security standards

You'd understand that when one of your customers enters their credit card information into your website to make a purchase for you, it's more than just a money exchange. Add to that the personal information and other sensitive information they're handing you. That is a significant responsibility for you.

As a result, it's critical that your website adheres to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). It specifies how organizations must collect, store, process, and transmit cardholder data in a secure manner in order to thwart fraud.

You must be PCI compliant regardless of the channel through which you accept credit card payments. To clarify, the PCI standards cover, but are not limited to, the following types of customer data:

1. Shopping carts and payment apps

2. Card readers

3. Point-of-sale systems

4. Wireless access routers

5. Systems that store or transmit payment card data

6. Paper-based records such as receipts

Compliance hurdles you'll need to clear

Also, don't expect your anti-fraud tools and software to keep your payment channels and methods clean. The number of PCI compliance hurdles you must clear depends on how many payments you process each year.

In addition, when your company uses different payment touchpoints, the scope of your compliance changes.

You're correct if you think we're not talking about a universal standard here. It is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Level 1 merchants, for example, must pass quarterly network scans and submit an annual compliance report, among other much more technical requirements, if they process more than six million transactions per year, regardless of the acceptance channel.

Perhaps your company falls into the Level 2 (one million to six million transactions per year), Level 3 (20,000 to one million), or Level 4 merchant categories (less than 20,000 transactions but also includes all companies that process a million Visa transactions a year).

Every year, merchants at levels 2, 3, and 4 complete a PCI DSS Self-Assessment Questionnaire, and they may also require a quarterly network security scan.

Extra tools to tackle fraud

Check to see if your payment provider provides additional anti-fraud measures such as Velocity checks, 3D Secure, and Card Verification Values (CVV).

• Velocity checks count the number of times customer data occurs within a given time interval.

• Before making a payment with 3D Secure, the cardholder must provide a password.

• CVV confirms that the customer has that card and that the information matches the credit/debit card company's records.

Tokenisation is another method of securing your payment data: the functionality securely encrypts card data through tokenized transactions. That is, it converts the transaction into a long, unique string of characters that has no meaning or value other than to represent the original piece of data. Tokenisation is widely regarded as an excellent anti-fraud system because if hackers intercept your tokenized customer card data, they will be unable to do anything with it because it is meaningless.