Essential Features for Taking Payments for Your Business
Many payment industry players like merchants, ISOs, payment facilitators, and PSPs are not satisfied with their payment processing relationships. In most cases, their current processors do not support some particular technical features they need.
Top Technical Features to Look for in a Payment Gateway
Besides transaction processing costs, technical features are important criteria of payment processing partner selection. Specific factors include:
- ease of integration with the processor’s platform,
- user-friendly reconciliation and settlement logic,
- clear reporting mechanisms and report formats,
- support for soft transaction descriptors,
- efficient chargeback disputing procedures,
- fraud prevention,
- specific payment types (ACH, EBT, gift and loyalty cards, etc).
ISOs and facilitators have an interest in more advanced features, such as batch transaction processing, merchant onboarding, and provisioning, etc.
As ISOs, payment facilitators, and payment service providers, need to process payments of other businesses and to support merchant lifecycle (from onboarding to chargeback management).
If your current processor does not provide certain features, then, you can either request these particular features or migrate to a new processor. The migration of merchants and data from one processor to another is a challenging task, requiring a clear strategy. However, sometimes, it is the only way possible. The situation is, actually, quite common for many companies. But as they evolve, new requirements emerge, which the processor might be unable to satisfy.
A useful tip for any company that is looking for an optimal processing partnership is to discuss the most important features with the processor, first and foremost. If your potential processing partner does not support the features that are most important for you or your sub-merchants, then it might be no reason to continue negotiations with it.
More information on these and other problems and on the ways of their solution can be found in the guide on the fundamentals of payment processing.