If you’re currently doing business on just one sales channel (for instance, in a brick-and-mortar store or online), it can seem easiest to find a payment processing solution that’s designed for that channel and that channel only. However, you can’t just think about the ways you do business today; you have to think strategically about how your business may evolve in the future – especially if you’re focused on growth. This is where omni-channel payments can streamline your own operations and deliver a better customer experience.
Related Content: The Benefits of Omni-Channel Payments
Beyond “The Big Three”
Omni-channel payment solutions often incorporate the “Big Three”: online credit card payments, retail/EMV credit card payments, and MOTO credit card payments. Most transactions fall under these categories, but some merchants identify additional needs as their business grows.
Might employees end up working from home to the point where they’d need a system where they can process credit cards remotely? Would your customers ever ask you to accept non-traditional payment methods such as Apple Pay or Google Pay in your retail stores or on your website? What about crypto? It’s not enough to find an omni-channel payment platform that works flawlessly in your stores or your back office; you need to accommodate all the ways your customers want to do business.
Support for Core Business Processes
The same concept applies for your business processes. Do you use zero-dollar authorizations? How do you process refunds? Do you have different processes for stock items vs made to order? It’s not enough to just pick a payment processing solution that supports all your sales channels; it needs to support all your logistics as well. Otherwise, you’ll spend more time trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole.
Seamless Integration
Your omni-channel payments platform needs to be able to integrate with your other business systems. Everything should tie back to your ERP (or the individual applications you use on a day-to-day basis) to streamline your recordkeeping and eliminate data silos. When your order entry team needs to charge a customer’s card, they should be able to do so as part of their existing workflow – without having to go to a completely separate application and manually enter the details. When your accounting and finance teams need to get data for reconciliation or reporting, they shouldn’t have to chase it down from multiple places. When your fulfillment team needs to know the status of a particular order, they should be able to look it up in systems they already use. Seamless integration should be the goal – and really, it should be viewed as a requirement.
Best-in-Class Uptime
Customers who buy online expect to be able to complete the process in four minutes or less.
Customers who buy in store are willing to walk away when checkout lines are prohibitively long – and retailers lose billions of dollars in revenue as a result.
Customers who call merchants feel that waiting on hold for just one minute is too long – and hanging up the phone is considerably easier than walking out of a brick-and-mortar store that required travel time both ways.
Considering these potential impacts, anything that slows down the checkout process – no matter where it is – can be a major problem. Put simply: merchants can’t accept unreliable solutions that go down at inopportune times. Ask potential vendors about their uptime and the support processes they have in place to deal with any issues that might arise.
Reliable Security
Last – but certainly not least – security is absolutely crucial. How do the technologies transmit cardholder data to the acquirer? Will it be stored on your own system or will it be stored in the service provider’s vault? (If you’re able to avoid touching the data, you can bypass some of the compliance requirements set forth by PCI.) These are all crucial questions to ask, regardless of where you’ll be using the platform to process your payments.
Discover Curbstone’s Omni-Channel Payment Solutions
We get it: payments can be complicated. There’s a lot to consider – but we’re here to make it as easy as possible.
Curbstone’s omni-channel payment solutions are designed to support all the ways you do business. Check out all the ways you can consolidate your retail, e-commerce, and MOTO transactions, or contact us for more information.
