As customers and clients in every industry continue to rightfully demand the highest quality of products and services, independent software vendors (ISVs) are increasingly expected to provide their end-users with seamless payment functionality integrated directly into their software or app. While this isn’t necessarily an industry requirement, if the applications you design don’t come with payment processing capabilities, then prospective customers will simply seek out an ISV that can provide these things.
Payment functionality extends well beyond the simple credit card processing you normally associate with doing business. In addition to swiping, dipping or tapping capabilities, the development process must also factor in:
- Trusted payment security
- Multiple payment acceptance options
- Seamless payment integration
Let’s look at each of these.
1. Trust payment security
This is arguably the most important starting point. If you’re unable to protect your end-users from fraud and abuse, then little else matters. But what does payment security mean in the context of ISV development? A few of the most importance tips include:
- Making sure your tools work with PCI-compliant payment processors
- Encrypting any user data that is stored within your applications
- Requiring strong passwords (and disabling default logins for new users)
For additional protection, consider using tokenization. Although this security measure is normally reserved for credit card data, it should be applied to any personal information that is captured, processed, stored or sent using the tools you build.
2. Multiple payment acceptance options
You should give end-users a wide variety of payment acceptance options. The more methods you can provide, the better experience they can provide to their own customers.
For the ISVs that limit their payment processing capabilities to only accept credit cards, they still need to account for variations in how that card data is captured:
- Legacy plastic, for example, works with a terminal’s magnetic strip swiper.
- Chip-enabled cards are directly inserted into EMV readers.
- Contactless cards can be waved across terminals that use near field communication (NFC).
These examples are just for in-person purchases and credit cards are only scratching the surface. You must also factor in:
- Mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and wearable technologies
- E-commerce and mobile in-apppayments
- ACH, wire transfers and other interbank payments
Again, the interface can change for each of the above. Will end-users be processing payments at a point-of-sale (POS) register, from a desktop terminal or from a self-checkout kiosk? Some payment features can be easily added later using simple software updates. Other times, however, implementation will require advanced planning — and in some cases, additional hardware.
3. Seamless payment integration
Some ISVs design their payment functionality in a black-box environment. Incoming sales stay within the system. Users must extract and manually input this information into whatever accounting, CRM and sales tools they use to run their businesses.
Unfortunately, this process is extremely time-consuming, especially for clients with large transactional volumes. It’s also quite expensive because lower-level employees are often tasked with this manual data entry. Those are extra hours (and wages) that could be directed elsewhere.
With a payment integration, it’s possible to automate the capture and reporting of incoming sales. Every time there’s a new transaction, that purchase is instantly reflected in the user’s accounting and CRM tools — without human intervention required.
Many payment processors offer plug-and-play integration options that work out of the box. You may stumble upon a module that delivers all of the payment features you need to offer to your clients and their customers.
Some processors also support open APIs that allow ISVs to design custom-built payment integrations from the ground up. If your team frequently develops sophisticated platforms, this is probably the better approach to take.
How We Make ISV Payments Easier to Implement
Providing your clients with seamless payment functionality isn’t always easy, but it’s increasingly necessary for those ISVs that want to remain competitive in today’s constantly evolving landscape.
Simply put, if you can’t provide your clients with secure payment options that mesh nicely with the tools they already use, those clients will source an ISV that can. With the right approach, adding the payment features you need doesn’t have to be complicated. At CardConnect, for example, we offer our customers the following:
- PCI-compliant payment processing, complete with a range of additional fraud prevention tools to help keep end-users’ information safe
- Support for a broad range of payment options and interfaces including credit cards, ACH, virtual terminal, mobile payments and digital wallets
- Seamless payment integration, whether you prefer using standalone modules that work out of the box or open APIs that allow you to design new types of integration from the ground up
Most importantly, we have an entire support team dedicated to providing the unique payment needs of each ISV we partner with. If you’d like to learn more about our approach to secure payment functionality, connect with our ISV team today by complete the form here.