Payment Processing: Did You Know The 3 P’s Of Payment Processing?

Elisa Posted by:

Online shopping’s fever has risen in today’s economy, resulting in setting up of digital shops to accept online payments. Success is extending friendship hands to businesses that are incorporating online payment processing. Feeling like starting? Understand the essential 3 P’s first:

Players

Payments

Pricing

Players

In terms of processing credit and debit cards, there are three major players. On the one end is the business or merchant, on the other end is the customer and middle section is occupied with technology that connects the two.

Merchant: To accept credit and debit cards from online customers, partnering with key players is important. A business owner needs a merchant bank who accepts payments on its behalf to deposit them in the merchant account.

Customer: Customers need credit or debit card to pay online. Bank approving the card is known as the issuing bank.

Technology: In the middle are two technologies that enable you and your customer to transact. The first is the payment gateway, software that links your site’s shopping cart to the processing network. Second one is the payment processor who moves the transaction, sends a billing statement, and works with the bank and a lot more

Payments

Understanding how money moves from a customer to the business is quite important. Payment processing has two stages:

The authorization

The settlement

The authorization process involves:

1. Customer purchases a product on the website with credit or debit card

2. The details travel down the payment gateway, encrypting the data to maintain its privacy followed by sending it to the payment processor

3. Request is sent to customer’s issuing bank by the payment processor to assure whether they have enough credit for the payment

4. In case of ‘approval,’ issuer responds with ‘yes’ and in case of ‘denial,’ issuer responds with ‘no’

5. Payment processor sends the answer about approval of sale and asks the merchant bank to credit the merchant’s account

Now comes the settlement phase or the second phase:

1. Card issuer sends the funds to merchant bank to deposit the money into their account

2. Funds are transferred



Pricing

Everyone who is involved with transaction needs to get paid be it the issuing bank, credit card association, merchant bank or the payment processor.



Every time a sales transaction is processed, four fees are paid: