An internet outage can bring a business to a standstill. When your connection drops, so does your ability to process customer payments. Payment outages not only result in lost revenue, but also customer frustration and loss of brand trust.
Fortunately, offline card processing provides a vital safety net, ensuring you can continue accepting card payments even when your systems lack connectivity.
What is Offline Card Processing?
Offline card processing, also known as store-and-forward, allows you to accept credit and debit card payments without an active internet connection. Instead of sending transaction data for immediate authorization, the authorization is delayed, and transactions are queued up until systems are back online. Once the internet connection is restored, the system automatically forwards the batched transactions for approval.
This capability is crucial for businesses that operate in areas with spotty internet, such as pop-up shops, food trucks, or at trade shows. It also serves as an essential backup for brick-and-mortar stores, protecting them against revenue loss during unexpected network disruptions.
Security and Offline Card Processing
Since transactions are not authorized in real-time, there can be concern around increased risk of accepting cards that are either expired or being used fraudulently.
Keeping your customer data secured in the event of offline card processing is significant. Storing sensitive cardholder data, even temporarily, requires robust encryption. Compliance with PCI DSS standards is mandatory to protect against potential data breaches and avoid any reputational damages. A business cannot store card information on their point-of-sale if they want to decrease risk and remain compliant with PCI DSS standards.
However, there are solutions out there that alleviate these concerns. It’s important to make sure that the offline card processing solution that you choose secures all transactions via PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE), along with other fraud prevention tools.
Offline Card Processing vs. Other Fallback Options
To stay online, some businesses will choose to have a secondary Internet connection for their POS systems or bring the in-store payment experience mobile with QR code or app-based payments.
While these options do provide a fallback option for businesses to continue accepting payments, it doesn’t ensure the greatest business continuity. From the time that an Internet outage is detected to when the secondary connection is online, there’s still opportunity for payment disruption. With QR code and app-based payments, customers without a phone on their person or aren’t as technologically savvy are alienated and still unable to make purchases.
These solutions are also irrelevant in the face of a downstream processor outage. If your processor is down, it doesn’t matter if you have an additional Internet connection or switch over to mobile payments.
Offline card processing, on the other hand, enables the continuous function of the in-store payment experience, seamlessly cutting over to offline mode when payment devices lose connection. And it still works when a merchant’s processor is down. To the customer, it’s still business as usual.
Handle Offline Payments Seamlessly with FreedomPay
Navigating the complexities of offline card processing requires a reliable and secure solution. With FreedomPay, it’s a no-brainer.
FreedomPay offers a robust, secure payment gateway designed to handle these challenges with ease. Our platform ensures that your business can continue to operate smoothly, no matter the connectivity status of your technology.
With FreedomPay, transaction data is captured and encrypted at the point of interaction, safeguarding sensitive information until it can be securely transmitted. Our system is built for reliability, automatically forwarding transactions for authorization as soon as a connection becomes available, which minimizes delays and simplifies reconciliation.
By integrating with our payment gateway, you can confidently serve customers anywhere, anytime, turning potential disruptions into seamless sales experiences.