In the new world of ubiquitous online commerce, payments are a key piece of the puzzle. If you can’t take payment online you aren’t in the game. No e-commerce site can exist without the ability to take consumer payments.
Few companies attempt to do this themselves; instead they use a gateway service and hand off this complex task to a platform provider that offers this key functionality as a service in the cloud.
When a customer wants to complete a transaction, the online provider passes the payment information to a service like IBM’s payment gateway and IBM takes care of it.
In one relationship and through a single piece of code, a business can take payments from anywhere in the world, embracing a huge range of payment types from credit and debit cards around the globe.
Businesses and customers are mindful of the risks of using credit and debit cards on the net. Payment gateways take care of these issues with deep and sophisticated security, not only at transaction layer but at every stage even down to the devices in the chain of the transaction. Security is a huge issue and payment gateways like IBM Payment Gateway make that the absolute core of their offering.
The third leg to the benefit of using a payment gateway as a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) is that it pulls all the transaction data together so that the results can be easily be integrated into a company’s settlement and financial processes. The Gateway provides transaction records as a data feed, centralizing everything a vendor needs to minimize the commercial burden at an operational level.
A payment gateway provides an e-commerce company with global reach, security and automated settlement in a tightly integrated and easy to implement package, outsourced and in the cloud as a SaaS.
Enterprise-class payment gateways provide straight forward, cost effective, visible and lean solution in the fast moving business environment of e-payments.