Picture every payment solution across your entire operation. For the typical merchant, this could comprise of point of sale (POS) terminals across several stores along with an ecommerce presence. For large-scale global enterprises, this may also include several ecommerce systems, self-service kiosks, pay-at-table solutions, thousands of POS terminals, etc.
Now imagine all of these solutions being connected to one another, delivering the same payment experience to customers in every channel and providing centralized visibility and reporting across every system. This best defines the concept of integrated payments.
Integrated Payments & Unified Commerce
The cornerstone of integrated payments is connectivity. Integrated payments describe a merchant’s selling systems connected with their payment systems and unified on a single platform. This integration centralizes the payment ecosystem, streamlining reporting and providing the opportunity to follow the customer journey across multiple channels. Know exactly when, where and how many transactions are occurring across the business, all in one place.
Integrating payments play a monumental role in the implementation of a unified commerce strategy. Unified Commerce is the strategy that seamlessly connects back-end systems with customer facing channels. Commerce cannot be unified without payments being integrated. An integrated payment solution, and therefore unified commerce, both start with choosing a payment gateway to securely accept payments and streamline transaction routing. From there, data is collected and made available on the unified commerce platform, where merchants can then make decisions based on real-time information. No more reliance on outside solutions for data unification.
Payment Optionality & Security
By integrating payments and implementing a payment gateway, merchants can easily accept multiple payment types. The merchant will no longer have to set up individual integrations with the payment processors in their ecosystem, streamlining the availability of private-label cards, gift cards and alternative payment methods. This has a huge positive effect on the customers’ experience, as they are assured consistency in the payment process across multiple channels and can use their preferred payment method, such as credit or debit card, mobile wallet or Buy Now Pay Later.
There are added advantages to merchants when they decide to integrate their payment solutions with a payment gateway. Besides increasing the number of payment options, the value proposition around an integrated payment gateway is security. A PCI-compliant payment gateway would offer payment security through point-to-point encryption (P2PE), and therefore keeps merchants out of PCI scope.
How can a merchant integrate payments?
Payment integration doesn’t have to require a heavy lift. Integrating payments should also mean injecting payments into your existing tech stack. With the right agnostic and independent partner, this is more than possible. With a unified commerce platform, there is no need to rip and replace legacy tech, but rather facilitate one point of integration to any processing, acquiring, and payment technology partners around the world. One integration providing unlimited choices.
The good news for merchants is that the integrated payment solutions on the market make it very easy to unify payment systems. Merchants can either directly integrate with a payment gateway or they can implement a point of sale or property management system that is already integrated with a payment gateway solution.
The FreedomPay Next Level CommerceTM platform offers integrated payment solutions to merchants and enterprise-level operations. The platform offers every benefit listed above plus thousands of integration opportunities, ensuring seamless implementation of a unified payment ecosystem. Implementing our Secure Switching solution is the first step in the integration process. Explore more about the Next Level CommerceTM solution here.