How to enable a best-practice ‘redundant’ payments approach

With all the issues at NAB’s online payment service recently…

@NAB Man my customers are angry and rightly so its been nearly 24 hours. Give us a timeframe please.

— MuscleBox (@Muscle_Box_me) June 2, 2015

Which also affected Secure Pay customers…

Why @NAB payments portal fix was so disastrous is still a mystery http://t.co/WXoMxjMXRL @braintree @SecurePayAus via @smh

— Simon Pallister (@simonpallister) June 7, 2015

It’s now more clear than ever the need for businesses to safeguard themselves from unexpected and disastrous downtime from their payment service provider.

With extreme losses recently suffered by both businesses and not-for-profits alike many found themselves highly exposed and looking at either one of two solutions.

Pre Paydock Solution #1: Switch providers

This is an obvious yet expensive approach approach I’ve seen many organisations take. Requiring a business-level disentangling of services, websites, applications, management and accounting – it’s always been a highly expensive option (and no more guaranteed) when it comes to stability.

Functional limitations still exist and merchants hold their breath hoping their new partner stays online and their business needs don’t outgrow their gateway.

It really falls into the ‘what else could we do’ department, as Option Two (below) carries its own price tag.

Pre Paydock Solution #2: Incorporate multiple providers

We’ve spoken to organisations who now consider this route. The costs here are extraordinary, with development needing to ‘wire in’ two (or more) gateways to cover functional needs yet provide some kind of backup. There are direct fees from the gateway provider as well as development and administration costs, not to mention the difficulty in managing customer data.

It’s not hard to see that neither of these solutions do not truly represent a elegant insurance policy against gateway downtime.

Paydock provides an alternative approach to the market.

The Paydock Solution…

With Paydock customers have the opportunity to wire into a single API – and work with many gateways. You can ‘red-light, green-light’ gateways through a simple check with our API and perform transaction routing depending on the result.

What this means is that if a payment hits a brick wall because a given gateway is down, Paydock customers can literally pass that through to the next gateway in runtime.

Paydock will minimise downtime, disruption & loss of income.

Furthermore, because we have a semantic API, it’s easy to add to your existing services and as new gateways are added you can drive down direct costs and increase your functional mix with our built-in recurring engine.

We’ve found our customers often don’t even have to uproot their existing merchant/gateway facility but can maintain established banking relationships but, this time, sleep at night knowing there’s a backup, new features and a better solution, ‘just in case’.

We’d love to have a discussion about how we can help your specific business needs, reduce pain and ensure business stability. Email us on [email protected] or contact us online.

~Rob