Top Payments Enhancements World-Class Merchants Are Adding Now

Merchants are striving to expand their payments enhancements to meet changing customer preferences. Customers increasingly prefer to use specific payment types, but they also want an overall payment experience that is simplified, consistent, and as frictionless as possible. Yet, while merchants endeavor to meet customer expectations, their efforts often result in an increasingly complex payments environment—this can lead to internal resources feeling overwhelmed with managing the payment processing system.

Top merchants are combating this burden and frustration by partnering with a payments orchestration partner to help them manage the increased complexity while adding their preferred top payments enhancements. The enhancements include:

• Alternative payments.
• Downtime mitigation.
• Robust cardholder data security.
• Redundant connectivity to third-party service providers and processors.

OLS can provide merchants access to the latest payments capabilities, helping them increase functionality, simplify payments complexity, and continue offering a great customer experience.

What are some emerging payment enhancements popular among merchants?

Emerging payments are quick, simple, and secure. Consumers see these popular payment methods as a more convenient way to exchange money, providing greater consumer convenience and a more effortless shopping experience. Generally cashless, some of the most popular emerging payment enhancements include mobile payments, wallets, bank transfers, prepaid cards, and digital currency.

Strategically Using Multiple Processors to Improve Your Payments System

The benefits of a future-ready payments system are wide-ranging and include becoming less tethered to any individual acquirer and providing merchants with increased flexibility. The OLS solution simplifies switching acquirers by providing a layer of abstraction between the merchant and acquirers. We make it possible to utilize multiple acquirers allowing merchants to route transactions to the acquirer that costs the least.

OLS focuses on helping merchants reduce the overall cost of payments acceptance, and the ability to utilize multiple processors can help merchants with better pricing and improved services. Merchants have much more freedom to choose the processors that fit their needs and never have to feel locked into any one provider.

Implement Encryption and Tokenization Without Getting Locked In

Utilizing encryption and tokenization in your payments ecosystem is becoming table stakes. However, many merchants may be using processor-provided services to take advantage of these security enhancements. This can often lead to being locked into a relationship with a processor due to limitations in the portability of these services. Instead, leading merchants partner with providers who allow merchant ownership of the tokens and vault and flexibility in the deployment of encryption. OLS is one such partner, providing a highly flexible point-to-point encryption service and allowing merchants to maintain ownership of all tokens without storing them in the merchant’s payment system.

Improving Reliability and Worry-Free Payments Enhancements

The complexity of the payments environment has inevitably led to a rise in the number of potential failure points and the transaction flow. Often a matter of when and not if a merchant will be affected, two of the top payments enhancements that merchants can add are enhanced redundancy and offline processing. 

Offline processing, which can involve stand-in processing, store and forward, and intelligent routing of transactions to redundant service providers or processors, allows merchants to continue to complete transactions even when one or more points along the process flow are unavailable.

Incorporating Emerging and Alternative Payments Into Your Payments System

Offering emerging and alternative payment solutions means reaching more consumers and removing friction experienced during the transaction process. Many factors, including location, demographics, and income, in a global economy, may contribute to people’s payment preferences. As the demand for a broader set of payment methods rises, it will be vital for merchants to have the technology to accept these various payment types and deploy them quickly.

The ever-expanding list of payment mechanisms, QR codes, or bar codes is another payments enhancement that merchants should be looking to implement. QR codes are an increasingly common payment method as they are utilized for more mobile wallets, including those providing access for shoppers to pay with cryptocurrency. When it comes to reaching international shoppers, offering digital currency allows businesses to quickly receive money from these shoppers while often avoiding the hefty transaction fees generally associated with accepting international payments.

Adding Top Payments Enhancements With the Help of an Orchestration Partner

Having the proper payments enhancements in place is vital for merchants to maintain a competitive advantage. Merchants need a tailored payments solution that enables required features based on capacity needs and the specific needs of your customer journey, making it flexible and efficient to scale. Contact us today to learn how OLS Payments can help you add top payments enhancements that are future-ready and provide an omnichannel customer experience.

Key Takeaways

• Merchants need a payments orchestration partner to help them add top payments enhancements, including alternative payments and multiple processors. 
• Offering emerging and alternative payment solutions means reaching more consumers and removing friction experienced during the transaction process.
• Utilizing multiple processors provides more leverage for merchants and can offer better pricing.
• OLS Payments provides merchants with a tailored payments solution that is future-ready.