Tag Archive for: gateways

Multi user access and role management

Managing a team’s permissions and access to sensitive customer and payment data in an increasingly complex payments world has traditionally been complex and difficult.

With new payment methods entering the market and different providers providing different logins with different permissions, managing an organisational-wide policy has been difficult… until now.

As one of our most asked for features, we have been working hard over the last few months to:

  • Provide greater data security to all stakeholders
  • Increase the ease with which you view and manage customers and connected payment services
  • Reduce the cost and time associated with payments administration
  • Gain greater value from preferred service providers

To Summarise

You can now add multiple users on the PayDock platform and grant various permissions for each user.

For existing clients, this feature has already been turned on and activated on your account at no additional cost.

Roles Overview

There are four new permission levels: Admin, Manager, Customer Service and Reporting.

Admin Manager Customer Service Reporting
Users All
Customers All Search, Modify Search, Modify Search
Notifications All Search, Create, Modify, Resend, Delete
Charges All Search, Create, Refund Search, Refund  Search
Subscriptions All Search, Create
Payment Methods All Search, Create, Modify

Admin

This is the full access permission which has no restrictions on capabilities. This is normally reserved for the business owner or an administrator of your platform.

The login used to create the account is granted admin permission by default.

Manager

This role gives you full control on the payments through PayDock such as creating charges, subscriptions, notifications and drive refunds.

This role is designed for someone in accounts or sales where they need control of the transactions but without some of the admin permissions.

Customer Service

This is for your support service centre with the ability to edit customers information, get status on existing transactions and perform refunds.

There is no ability to create any new transactions or add customers inside PayDock, only modify existing records.

Reporting

This permission allows your bookkeeper or accountant to view payments and customers information with being able to download the results into a csv.

Some other applications of this role could be sales managers needing to create reports or even allowing future investors to get real live data of sales through your platform. This function can save the task of exporting the data and sending it manually.

How to access this new feature?

1. Access the “My Company” tab of your user administration

2. Visit the “Company Users” page

3. Add new user and assign role

For more information or help on how to set this up please contact [email protected].

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How To Be A Gateway Ninja

What are the current problems surrounding gateway integration?

Talking to some of our payments advisors, we found that common problems faced by developers surrounding the integration of gateways include:

 

  1. Upfront cost
    • Different technologies used by each gateway
      • Each gateway has its own API (eg REST, SOAP) as well as a different required data and sets of calls required
    • The time and cost of integration
      • Not all payment methods were created equal and some may have layers of complexity that need to be carefully integrated. 
  2. Maintenance cost
    • Maintenance costs due to the ongoing coding required
      • Need to update your code to stay up to date with the gateway’s API.
  3. Aggregation of gateways
    • Inability to view all transaction data from a single point after integrating several payment methods
    • Difficulties in accessing customer payment information across different gateways
      • Can’t store Gateway X customer payment details on Gateway Y
      • Do not have a central location to store all your customer payment details

 

Why Paydock?

We know the struggle of working with multiple payment gateways (while juggling client requirements). Like you, we know that development, profitability and third party management can be a tall order, especially in payments, where there are multiple barriers to final delivery. This is where PayDock can help.

 

Paydock is a smart payments platform designed for merchants and developers. We offer a number of features to solve your payments pain:

    1. Upfront cost
      • Reduces cost of integration with gateway development effort
        • Development time and cost for your website or app is significantly reduced-you only have to integrate with Paydock once to enable access to all payment methods globally.

 

    1. Maintenance cost
      • Reduce maintenance costs.
        • Paydock keeps up to date with the gateway so you don’t have to worry about updating.

 

  1. Aggregation of gateways
    • Enhances available functionality through a built in recurring, notification and processing engine.
    • Enables easy monitoring of transaction data through a single interface.
      • If you do decide to move to a new gateway, your history, data and account will all  remain with you/move with you as Paydock’s external token vault stores all payment sources regardless of payment gateway or payment type.
    • Enables a frictionless payments experience for your client .
      • Customer experience and technical solutions are improved through the realtime workflow engines.
      • Sales friction is reduced by offering your customers a number of gateways including Pin Payments, Stripe, eWAY, PayPal, Worldpay and more!

 

What else?

We offer an easy to work with REST API which can be used to integrate Paydock into your application, with a flexible subscription engine that allows you to set specific start dates, end dates, amount, frequency and interval, along with other payment facilities such as multi-currency routing and automatic retries and webhooks/ alerts.

 

Paydock also offers a variety of software development kits (SDKs), including Javascript SDK, .Net SDK, Java SDK with iOS and Android on the way, to make integration as easy as possible.

 

How do I get started?

Paydock offers a sandbox for testing, as well as excellent developer docs for you to use and test out.

 

You can also talk to one of our friendly payments advisors at [email protected]

 

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Buy Now, Pay Later: How to Generate More Revenue

From prehistoric systems of barter and trade to simple forms of currency, and paper cheques to little plastic cards, it is evident that payment methods are constantly evolving. The modern rise of new alternative payments methods (non cash methods of transaction) such as E-wallets, digital currency, mobile payment methods and so forth can be seen as a new chapter in the world of payments. Alternative payment methods (APMs) are now predicted to take a 59% share in all e-commerce transactions in 2017. An example of an Alternative Payment Method that is changing the e-commerce industry are Buy Now, Pay Later schemes.

 

The increased popularity of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) schemes such as Afterpay and ZipMoney have created new opportunities for savvy e-commerce stores. Consumers are able to pay for their goods with instalments over a period of time while retailers receive payment on the day of the purchase with all credit and fraud risk taken on by the relevant BNPL scheme.

 

In particular, the flexibility of Afterpay has attracted a large amount of consumers, holding a 10% share of all transactions in the Australian online fashion market and a 2.1% share in the online retail market. Various retailers, such as Veronika Maine and General Pants Co have stated that their average order value increased by 22-25% after introducing Afterpay.

 

What can you do?

By offering BNPL schemes such as Afterpay and ZipMoney, you not only capture potential customers but also increase the amount and value of goods they purchase. ZipMoney observed an increase in average order values of between 40%-130% (where zipMoney is the chosen form of tender) and a 40% increase in items per order.

 

How can Paydock help?

Paydock enables e-commerce stores to offer both APMs and traditional payment methods to their consumers. Paydock customers can now snap up more customers and generate additional sales through BNPL schemes with ease through our API.

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How to Reduce Checkout Friction for Your Customers

What is checkout friction?

Checkout friction is anything that stands between your customer wanting a product and being able to purchase it. This includes things that slow down the process, including typos, slow loading pages, pop up ads, sign up processes or even things that stop the purchase altogether, such as an outdated link on a “buy now” button.

Checkout friction is the largest cause of cart abandonment rates; even higher than hidden shipping costs, complicated return policies and security concerns.

How can I decrease the amount of checkout friction on my website?

For larger merchants:

  1. Flexibility: allow customers to pay via mobile apps and mobile optimised sites.
  2. Offer a better customer User Experience (UX): this may mean using autofill APIs to remember customer information, or making the payments process as easy to navigate as possible. A better UX could potentially yield a 400% increase in conversion rates.
    Examples include;

    • Personalised payment process: This might mean keeping the colour, design, and font the same throughout your website. By keeping your payments pages synonymous with the theme of the website, an increased sense of cohesion is created.
    • Reduce checkout time: The Checkout Conversion Index found that the optimal time for checkout success is 134 seconds, with the worst performing sites needing 220 seconds. A way to reduce time taken to checkout is by integrating your payment gateway’s interface directly into your website instead of using a payment redirect page, which means customers no longer need to wait for a pop up to load.

For smaller merchants:

  1. Fewer info fields: More successful merchants ask for as little information from consumers as possible, whether that mean payments information, address fields or even registering for an online account.
  2. Slim your checkout process: Amazon’s patented “one click checkout” is a great example of reducing checkout friction. By allowing consumers to make a purchase through a single click, Amazon’s sales have increased by 5% each year. Instead of offering four or five different pages for consumers to click through as they attempt to pay, a single page interface that provides all the information (including what’s in the cart, the price etc.) drastically reduces checkout friction.
  3. Offer more payment methods: By accepting a variety of payment methods such as credit and debit cards, as well as alternate payment methods such as Afterpay, PayPal and zipMoney, the number of decision points for customers is reduced which maximises conversion rates. On average, better performing sites offer 6.8 payment methods versus 4 for underperformers.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock’s developer friendly REST API makes payment method integration easier. Our clients are able to drive greater conversions with no redirection and offer an optimised customer payments experience.

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A Quick Guide to the Advantages of Recurring Payments

What are recurring payments?

Recurring payments are automatic payments deducted from a credit card or bank account on an agreed schedule (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). Recurring payments are useful for a wide range of payments – such as subscriptions for magazines, membership clubs and utilities bills.

What are the advantages for merchants?

  1. Decreases late or missed payments: As recurring billing happens automatically, there is a reduced risk of delayed or missed payments. Furthermore, budgeting is made much easier as payments are expected at regular intervals for customers.
  2. Improve customer relationships: By signing customers up to subscription arrangements, business are able to reduce the risk of churn and build stronger, sustainable customer relationships over time.
  3. Saves time and money: Business owners no longer need to manually manage all billing cycles. This frees up time so they can focus on their core business.

What are the advantages for customers?

  1. Saves time and effort: By setting up automatic payments, customers no longer have to manually input payments for their subscriptions.
  2. No more late fees: Previously, if a customer forgot to input a payment manually, they could potentially be hit with a late fee. The automatic nature of recurring payments means that such scenarios will no longer happen, saving money and effort for the consumer.
  3. Keeps information secure: Recurring billing allows customer information to be managed securely. The lack of paper bills means that the risk of duplicating and circulating sensitive information is minimised, as is the risk of employee error.
  4. Environmentally friendly: Each year, more than 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions are created by transporting paper bills alone. There is no longer a need for physical bills to be sent out as almost everything can be done online in this day and age.
  5. Leverage the growing demand for subscription services: Research has shown that there is an increased demand for the convenience and ease of subscription services, especially within younger generations. As of 2017, 70% of millennials have a subscription to a product and 89% have a subscription to a service. As a business, offering recurring payments can greatly improve customer experience, and help differentiate your business from others.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock is a smart payments platform that allows merchants to connect to various payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Paypal and more. We offer a recurring payments engine that overlays on top regardless of payment type, gateway, or frequency. Our clients are able to automate flexible customer subscriptions, increase revenue and reduce time spent with managing customer billing.

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Paydock and Round Table Apps Help SumoSalad Win QSR Media Award

Paydock would like to congratulate SumoSalad on winning Best Innovation in the Health Category at the prestigious QSR Media Detpak Awards for its My Sumo app! Launched in January 2017, the app allows customers to create and pay for their own salads and wraps before picking them up in-store.

When designing, SumoSalad needed to ensure that the app:

  • Is native on both iOS and Android.
  • Can connect to other APIs and apps such as FitBit to automatically log purchases to the customer’s FitBit diary.
  • Has a centralised menu database that can be updated and rolled out across all franchises on the app in an instant.
  • Has a simplified customer signup solution that can automatically distribute the data to franchises.
  • Can split payments between a customer’s loyalty points and their credit card/debit card
  • Works with any number and a diverse range of payment gateways and methods.
  • Triggers transactions and distributes customer data across multiple franchises and any payment gateway upon request.
  • Allows money and payment sources to be directly connected to the franchisees, so that each store has increased control of their pricing schedule without affecting other stores.

Having fulfilled most of the aims by partnering with Round Table Apps, SumoSalad needed to find a comprehensive payments solution. This is where PayDock came in.

How Paydock helped streamline the checkout experience

  • Paydock’s secure payments token vault gave SumoSalad’s the ability to store and pass on customer information within the app to reduce checkout friction.
  • Paydock enabled SumoSalad to integrate and bolt on additional payment gateways and solutions with ease, without further development costs.
  • Paydock’s ability to connect headquarter’s payment gateway directly with the franchisee’s downstream gateways allowed payments to go directly into the franchisee’s bank account, removing the need for any HQ intervention.

Happy results

SumoSalad is now able to offer a seamless online app experience, scale effortlessly and bolt on additional gateways for new franchises within seconds (they added 94 gateways in December 2016 with ease). Settlement delay is now reduced to as low as 1-2 days and is automated with their chosen payment gateway. In addition, franchisees enjoy the flexibility to add and change their online payments set up without huge development costs and without disrupting the operations of SumoSalad and other franchisees.

How Paydock can help your franchise business

The problem that SumoSalad encountered was not unique in any way. Many franchise businesses lose valuable time and administration cost rerouting payments from HQ back to each separate franchise.

What Paydock offers is an extensive payments solution that enables businesses to directly connect with their downstream gateways and reduce settlement delays. This increases data visibility, upgraded payments flexibility and a synchronised payments system.

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How to Combat Cart Abandonment Rates Effectively

According to Statista, the global average cart abandonment rate for the second quarter of 2016 was 74.52%. This means that out of 100 potential customers, 75 are leaving for reasons such as “extra costs too high”, “the site wanted me to create an account” and a “too long/ complicated checkout process”. Yet, the high cart abandonment rate is no cause for despair. Approximately 63% of abandoned sales is potentially recoverable by savvy online retailers.

 

So how can merchants reduce the cart abandonment rate?

  1. Offer free shipping. Savvy online consumers are looking for ways to save money. If you are unable to offer free shipping completely, promotions such as “Free shipping for orders over $75” or even making shipping costs clear and upfront have been shown to increase sales.
  2. Create a guest checkout process. Shoppers are reluctant to provide private information upfront, but are happy to create an account after they have purchased a product to track shipping and delivery times.
  3. Reduce the amount of steps taken to checkout. Conversion studies have shown that the less clicks to checkout there are, the lower the cart abandonment rate. If many pages are needed, it is a good idea to provide a progress bar or another visual indicator.
  4. Improving the security of transactions. Adding a security logo such as Symantec can increase sales by up to 42%
  5. Increasing the amount of payment methods. Offer common payment processes such as PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, as well as alternate payment methods (APM). APMs (such as E-wallets and mobile payment methods, transfers, digital currencies etc.) will account for more than half of all transactions by 2017, up from 43% in 2012. In a time where payment methods are becoming increasingly varied and complex, online merchants risk losing sales if they are unable to offer their customer’s preferred method.

 

How can Paydock help?

We aren’t saying that we can offer all solutions to high cart abandonment rates, but Paydock can definitely increase conversion rates by connecting your e-commerce store to multiple payment gateways and allowing access to new payment methods. We allow you to future proof your payments ecosystem in a time of rapid change and development.  

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Why Paydock empowers global Not-for-Profit fundraising

Global payment management across a distributed giving-base can be hard if you’re an international NFP.

Factor in local fundraising offices, currencies and admin you can be taking (and managing) money all the way from India to the UK and USA.

We know that using only a single ‘super’ provider rarely delivers the best value to your organisation. The friction  involved with re-routing your organisation to a single provider (who may not be best suited in all localities/currencies) can be high, and the direct and indirect costs involved with integrating multiple local services can itself increase expenses dramatically.

So, this leaves many not-for-profits in a challenging position. How do we manage global giving in a way that’s low-cost, easy and effective?

We know you would love to take recurring and one-off payments, in various currencies, with data and payment-event transparency, without disrupting existing banking and reconciliation processes or introducing prohibitive cost and pain. Read more

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Paydock provides more value for both customers and gateways

We love solutions where everybody wins

Building Paydock we noticed many of us typically experienced gateway discomfort when, with our existing (or proposed) payments provider, the functional set didn’t fully meet current or emerging business needs.

The juggling of many different criteria and the looking for the ‘uber’ service we actually needed without creating too much disruption or cost was hard. Very hard. And waiting for our current gateway to release the feature we needed could also take more time that we had.

Many reasons to stick existing/preferred gateways

Beyond this, other factors not just the ‘transaction’ component also formed part of the decision making scenario. These factors could be:

  • the convenience because we already banked with them
  • really good fees as a result of long term relationship with the existing bank/gateway
  • amazing support team and service
  • …or that ‘particular admin feature’

These are all good reasons, but what none of us wanted to find was that the gateway we finally engaged with (or currently used) had some unexpected limitation or drawback we didn’t realise.

Don’t switch gateways – just add value

Our gateway friends might even have ticked 80% of the boxes but because they didn’t have ’that’ critical feature (e.g. multi-currency or direct-debit processing), though all the other things were great, we couldn’t move ahead. Read more

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

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

Which also affected Secure Pay customers…

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

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