Acquiring for an e-commerce seller
Acquiring for an e-commerce seller
The Internet has taken over the world. This has already become an axiom.
Every little thing that you need and that you find in seconds, see on your phone or computer screen and buy, makes your e-commerce business even stronger.
Whether a person wants to buy a product or just check its availability, his first instinct is to go online and search there.
In fact, with the increasing popularity of using online stores for shopping, especially for the purchase of younger and more fashionable goods, traditional businesses are also opening online stores to further expand and match market trends.
Doing business online is different from traditional sales in offline stores.
And one of the most significant differences between them is the way customers pay for purchases. Being the owner of a traditional offline store, you could simply accept cash from the buyer, but this does not apply to e-commerce sellers.
For the latter, providing various payment methods is no less important than maintaining a large assortment of goods in stock.
The growth in the use of bank cards for payment shows that merchants must offer their customers convenient online card processing solutions in order not to lose a significant market share.
Are you a novice seller who wants to engage in e-commerce? Or do you trade online and want your trading account to have more payment options?
Finding modern acquiring services for e-commerce is where you need to start.
What is e-commerce bank card processing?
If you want to start accepting online payments for your goods and services, then you simply need bank card processing services.
Bank card processing solutions for e-commerce are the same for online stores as POS solutions for traditional businesses.
In both cases, the same process is used (payment by bank cards), but using different tools.
In the case of an offline sale using a POS terminal, information about the bank card is transmitted through it to the international payment system that owns the card (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), to the issuing bank and the acquiring bank.
The buyer’s authorization is carried out by entering the PIN code of the card into the POS terminal.
In e-commerce, the buyer must manually enter the card number, CVV code on a special page of the payment gateway, and then the code is sent to the phone number linked to his bank account.
That is, in order to make a purchase in an online store, a person must specify the product he needs, enter his payment details, and the transaction will be completed.
The processing of a bank card for e-commerce takes place at the same speed as the processing of a card in a POS terminal, that is, in real time.
Safe electronic acquiring solutions from Wellcoinex
Looking for an acquiring provider to start accepting online payments? Or do you want to find a more profitable option for a trading account?
Wellcoinexoffers the perfect payment solution for your ecommerce store.
Wellcoinex, headquartered in London, is a leading merchant account provider offering comprehensive bank card processing solutions for e-commerce, ideally suited to meet the payment requirements of online businesses.
No matter what business or product you are selling, with our strong network of acquiring banks and more than 95 percent seller approval rate, Wellcoinex opens its doors of cooperation wide for every merchant looking for high-quality bank card processing solutions for e-commerce.
Our advantages:
- High transaction security. We offer our customers a secure payment processing environment in accordance with PCI DSS Level 1.
- Favorable rates.
- We work with twenty currencies, including the most popular in the world and in the CIS countries – the US dollar, euro, Swiss franc, ruble, hryvnia, Belarusian ruble.
- Cloud storage and data transfer technologies, which allows our customers to work stably regardless of their computing capabilities, instantly use all updates of our software.
- Convenient modular system for connecting to Wellcoinex.
- Many convenient payment solutions:
- one-click payments;
- MOTO payments;
- Recurring payments;
- Payments by links and invoices.
Optimize payments and grow your business with the help of acquiring for e-commerce in Wellcoinex. Contact us and apply right now!
All You Need to Know About Crypto Acquiring
Have you ever wondered what it takes to process a single payment transaction? Our CEO, Peter Kozyakov, explains the complex system in simple words.
At the end of 2020, Mercuryo launched a new financial product, which almost immediately began to show good results. The demand for crypto-acquiring, a service that allows electronic stores to accept payments by credit and debit cards, is more relevant than ever.
From the buyer’s point of view, the process of paying for goods and services on the Internet does not look complicated. You choose the product you like, enter your credit card details, and after a few seconds the purchase is completed.
However, from the point of view of the seller and the payment provider, this is a complex mechanism, which requires a lot of time and effort to set up.
If you plan to sell cryptocurrency instead of goods and services, everything becomes even more complicated.
If you are a novice web merchant opening an online store, or a client who wants to learn how the magic of acquiring happens, we decided to demystify the process of Internet acquiring and share a few interesting moments.
Internet Acquiring: The Basics
When it comes to providing acquiring services, many participants are involved.
Firstly, we have a customer who has received a credit card from a bank (let’s call it an issuing bank).
Then this customer goes online and decides to buy something in the store. The store works with an acquiring bank. It can be the same bank that the buyer uses, or another; it does not matter.
And this bank provides the store with a payment solution that makes the entire online purchase transaction possible.
Therefore, when you pay for goods online, the store sends your card details to the acquiring bank.
The bank, in turn, transmits this information to Visa or Mastercard, and then they send it to the issuing bank to make sure that the card is legal and there are enough funds on the balance.
If everything is in order, the purchase is completed. But since the buyer has to wait until his order is shipped, monetary settlements between banks are also not instantaneous.
The issuing bank will send the funds to the acquiring bank only the next day if they are both, say, in the EU. As for the United States, it may take another day to receive funds.
After that, the acquiring bank will reimburse the amount to the store in accordance with their agreement.
This is just a brief introduction to how Internet acquiring works, but the devil is in the details.
Internet Acquiring: Special Aspects
Each financial service has a complex framework for fraud prevention and creating a highly efficient and secure environment for customers, merchants and banks.
Below are some of the most important aspects of the Internet acquiring model.
MCC
The seller’s category code or MCC is the code that the electronic seller receives during the registration process.
If you look at your credit card history, you will immediately see it – this is the category of the store where you made the purchase.
Whether it’s entertainment, food, travel, cosmetics or financial services – every seller has a code that defines it.
There are a few purposes to this metric:
- Determines the reward (cashback) that the buyer receives for using the card.
- It indicates whether the transaction data should be reported to the Tax Service.
- Determines what percentage the merchant should pay to the credit card processor.
By the way, financial services are one of the most expensive categories, and sometimes processors charge an additional commission, considering these operations as expensive as cash withdrawals.
Luhn algorithm
The Luna algorithm is a mathematical formula that helps to quickly determine whether a customer has provided reliable credit card information.
Errors often occur when entering credit card data, and the Luhn algorithm was designed to avoid them and speed up payment processing.
BIN
If you haven’t heard yet, the bank identification number (BIN) consists of the first six digits of your credit or debit card.
These numbers contain all the important information about the card, including its brand (Visa or Mastercard), type (debit, credit), level (platinum, gold, ordinary, etc.), as well as the country of the issuing bank.
In addition to providing important information to merchants, BIN helps prevent theft and other security breaches.
3-D Secure
The 3-D Secure protocol is an additional layer of security designed to protect credit and debit card transactions. In practice, it looks like this: when making a purchase, the buyer must confirm his identity by entering a one-time code sent by the card issuer to his phone via SMS.
This is an effective tool that protects all participants in the acquiring process and helps to reduce the number of refunds. However, it is necessary that both issuing banks and acquiring banks support the 3-D Secure function.
Otherwise, it will be much more difficult to resolve the situation if fraud does occur. Most banks support this feature, and some countries have made the 3-D Secure feature mandatory.
Interchange rate
Another important component of the Internet acquiring model is the commission for an interbank transaction.
These fees are set by credit card companies and must be paid by either the merchant or the customer.
In Europe, the interbank commission remains relatively low – about 0.4%. In the USA, this fee starts from 1% and can go up to 5% or even higher.
Platinum and gold cards have a higher interbank commission rate because they offer more benefits to their users.
The Interbank Commission encourages issuing banks to issue attractive promotional offers and encourage users to use credit cards more often.
Chargebacks
Chargebacks were invented to protect credit and debit card holders. For example, if your card was stolen or you received a damaged item, you have the right to demand your money back and receive a refund.
In fact, neither banks nor credit card companies like refunds because they symbolize losses. As a rule, the maximum number of chargebacks approved by financial institutions should not exceed 1%.
If your company goes beyond these limits, you are likely to have problems with the acquiring bank.