December 16th, 2013 by Elma Jane
1. Account Updater (Visa)
Incorrect billing information leads to declined credit cards, loss of sales and unhappy customers.
Visa touts its Account Updater as an easier way to keep customer data current. The tool appends all card data with up-to-date customer info so businesses can avoid difficulties over address changes, name changes, expired cards and more.
The tool can benefit any business that bills customers on a recurring basis.
It eliminates the need for manual administration, so it can lower your business’s operational costs and customer-service expenses. And by saving your clients the hassle of a declined payment, you can boost customer satisfaction and overall sales.
2. Netswipe
Paying online is convenient for customers, but keying in an unwieldy credit card number is still a pain.
Netswipe from Jumio gives customers an easier way: The tool lets users pay by snapping a photo of their credit card; it’s almost as easy as swiping your card through a traditional card reader.
According to Jumio, customers can use their smartphone or tablet to scan a card in as little as 5 seconds, whereas traditional key entry takes 60 seconds or more, on average. Having a quick and convenient way to pay could help contribute to a positive buying experience and encourage repeat business.
The system is compatible with any iOS or Android mobile device, as well as with any computer with a webcam.
3. Netverify
Jumio’s fraud-scrubbing tool helps you determine if your customers are who they say they are.
Net verify allows customers to snap a picture of their driver’s license or other identification using a smartphone, tablet or PC webcam. Once the image is taken, the tool can verify the authenticity of the documentation in as little as 60 seconds.
That’s much faster and more convenient than asking a customer to fax or mail a copy of their ID in the middle of a transaction.
The tool can verify identifying documents from more than 60 countries…including passports, ID cards and driver’s licenses, and even bank statements and utility bills. Jumio says its software is smart enough to automatically reject nonauthentic documents.
And customers can rest easy knowing that all submitted information is protected with 256-bit encryption to prevent identity theft.
Online merchants embed Netverify into their websites as part of the checkout process.
4. Payment Gateway
Payment Gateway service does all the heavy lifting of routing and managing credit card transactions online.
Portals like this one benefit small businesses by providing a fast and secure transmission of credit card data between your website and the major payment networks. It works a lot like a traditional credit card reader, but uses the Internet to process transactions instead of a phone line.
Payment Gateway also offers built-in fraud-prevention tools and supports a range of payment options, including all major credit cards and debit cards.
5. PayPal Here
Mobile credit card processing services like PayPal Here make it easy to accept credit cards in person using a smartphone or tablet.
PayPal Here and other similar services send you a dongle that attaches directly to your iPhone, iPad or Android device, allowing you to swipe physical credit cards wherever you are.
One major benefit of mobile credit card readers is that they work with the devices you already own. That means there’s no need to carry around additional hardware, aside from the reader add-on itself. Most credit card readers attach to your device via the headphone jack or charger port, and are small enough to fit in your pocket.
The smallest businesses have the most to gain by opting for mobile credit card readers, which are cheaper and far more portable than traditional options.
6. Virtual Terminal
If you do business online, your website needs the infrastructure to accept credit card information.
Web-based applications like virtual terminal offer the basic processing functionality of a physical point-of-sale system, and are easy to install on your business’s website.
The system allows merchants to collect orders straight from the Web, or take orders via phone or mail and before initiating card authorizations online.
It also includes extensive transaction history to help you manage payment data, split shipments, back orders and reversals. Business owners can even receive a daily email report of all credit card transaction activity from the prior day.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Reader Terminal, Credit Card Security, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Gift & Loyalty Card Processing, Mail Order Telephone Order, Merchant Cash Advance, Merchant Services Account, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Near Field Communication, Point of Sale, Smartphone, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account, Android, authenticity, card data, card reader, checkout, checkout process, credit card number, credit card transactions, debit cards, declined payment, expired, fraud, id, iOS, mail, mobile device, nonauthentic, online, online merchants, passports, payment data, payment gateway, payment options, phone, point of sale, recurring, smartphone, tablet, verify, visa, webcam
December 12th, 2013 by Elma Jane
A new study reveals that a staggering 68% of smartphone owners plan to use their devices to assist with their holiday shopping this year. According to Deloitte’s 28th annual survey of holiday spending intentions and trends, 56% of smartphone owners plan to use their phones to search for store locations. 54% will compare prices with their phones and 47% expect to use their phones to learn more about the products they wish to purchase.
The survey showed smartphone shoppers plan to spend 27% more on holiday gifts than non-mobile shoppers. Smartphone ownership has skyrocketed in 2013, rising from 42% last year to 61%, a change that is sure to influence the biggest buying season of the year.
The study also showed 38% of the consumers in the survey owned a tablet. 63% of those tablet owners will use their devices for holiday shopping this year. “Tablets are a two-way street for retailers. They have opened up an entirely new consumer touchpoint, where shoppers can view multiple retailers’ products regardless of their location…from their couch to the point of purchase. Retailers can also put tablets to work in their stores, providing both their sales team and customers with a broader lens into merchandise selection,” said Alison Paul, a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP retail & distribution. Now that the majority of consumers also own smartphones, these two devices have altered the way they interact with a brand, while also yielding a higher spend per customer.
Posted in Electronic Payments, Mobile Payments, Near Field Communication, Smartphone Tagged with: devices, merchandise, phones, retailers, shoppers, shopping, smartphone, tablet, touchpoint
October 3rd, 2013 by Admin
When managing a business nothing helps more than raw data. Storing that data in a database makes it infinitely more flexible and accessible. A database is an application that efficiently and effectively stores and retrieves data as well as ties that data to other data. Many large scale accounting applications like QuickBooks, PeachTree and many other titles store all their information in some form of a database.
Tables are like spreadsheets. Rows and columns group together data in an organized manner. Databases can have many tables with many columns or just a few. Relational databases like SQL database engines link tables together using what are known as primary and foreign keys. So in the example of an invoice the Customer table has a Primary key uniquely identifying a specific customer from the rest of all of the customers. The Invoice table stores a foreign key in its table so the match between customer id’s links the two tables. The invoices themselves also have a primary key so that there can be many invoices for the same customer. These concepts are actually born of a mathematics branch known as Algebra.
Data at its most basic level is a specific bit of information. Like the number 19 or a specific date and/or time. A database holds these bits of data and an application built to interact with a database is used to generate information from the data. A clearer example is the invoice. An invoice has quantities, part numbers, serial numbers, account numbers, dates and even totals which are not stored in the database but are calculated each time the invoice is accessed. Invoices bring many bits of data to a single entity most commonly referred to as a report. Looking at a common invoice explains a transaction with the details stored in many tables all tying back to a single transaction.
Database servers run a service that can be connected over connections on a local area network or over the internet to allow applications on different computers access to data simultaneously. Many websites like Facebook, NASA and even Google make extended use of databases to supply services to millions of users concurrently. Whether it’s over the internet or across a physical office space, a database can be the heart of a businesses information technology.
SQL databases conform to an industry standardized set of functionality so that complex queries can be performed without knowing the underlying technical architecture.
Open Source
Open Source is usually associated with applications that are free to download, distribute and modify. Many times open source applications are developed by a community of developers over the internet that take feature suggestions from the user community and build them into the application. Open source applications tend to follow one of several ‘licenses’ like the GPL or General Public License to make sure the program is unmolested or incorporated into a proprietary software trying to take credit for the programming code.
There are many examples of open source titles here.
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/All
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages
Open Source Databases
One aspect of open source known as LAMP has become wildly popular as the internet has matured. Lamp stands for Linux, the operating system, Apache, the web server component, MySQL, a wildly popular free and open database engine and the P stands for Perl, Python or PHP the three most popular languages of backend programming. Combining these components provides a very fertile ground for developing Web Applications that can be served across an office or the world. Many sites like Google and WordPress take full advantage of these technology to create feature rich applications that run in a web browser but work like a traditional desktop application like Microsoft Word. Being open source allows anyone to build on top of or out of the offering. This means you can customize the programming of any of these applications to best fit your particular style or way of doing business. This is a huge time saver for any small business.
Some common examples of open source applications that utilize Lamp architecture are listed below:
SugarCRM – A contact and lead management system to manage a sales force.
WordPress – The most popular blogging application on the internet.
OpenCart – An extremely flexible shopping cart software.
GNUCash – A full fledged accounting program.
Mobile Devices
Today we have smartphones and tablets that have web browsers built in and available for each platform. Using new techniques known as adaptive or responsive web layouts, information on a page automatically transform a web page to smaller displays. So any page can be designed once and displayed on a desktop browser, a tablet browser or a mobile phone browser. This allows web designers to best optimize the content for smaller displays while leaving the pages viewed on a desktop for a larger view. Using responsive design techniques your business data can even extend to mobile devices like iPhones and Android or Blackberry phones and tablets. The potential is huge for your business.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Point of Sale Tagged with: Android, bits, blackberry, data, database, e-commerce, information technology, Iphone, MySQL, open source, relational, shopping cart, smartphone, SQL, tablet
September 30th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Mind-Blowing 3D Trickery for Work or Play Occipital Promises
Get in on the ground floor as we look at the most exciting crowdfunded tech projects out there. Structure Sensor, which is pitched as the world’s first 3D sensor for mobile devices. The device is designed to be an attached-hardware add-on for mobile tablets and phones that allows the user to capture spatial models of objects and indoor areas.
If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing input device for the Xbox 360 game console, you’ll have an initial grasp of how Occipital’s 3D scanner for mobile devices, called “Structure Sensor”, functions. Whereas game add-on Kinect is a sensor for detecting and interpreting movement, new Kickstarter crowdsourced funding project Structure Sensor is for mapping three-dimensional spaces or objects.
What Is It? Occipital’s Structure Sensor is pitched as the world’s first 3D sensor for mobile devices. The device is designed to be an attached-hardware add-on for mobile devices that allows the user to capture spacial models of indoor areas – 3D models of objects – and perform augmented reality. The creator uses rooms, furniture and augmented reality games as examples. The captured 3D models can then be imported into CAD software of the kind used by architects and designers, or to a 3D printer to be replicated.
Technical Details Structure Sensor contains a precision infrared emitter, camera and optics that are housed in an anodized aluminum shell. The shell affixes to a bracket designed to clip to the 4th Generation Apple iPad. Data-streaming connectivity is with Apple’s Lightning Connector. Hardened glass is used to protect the dual infrared lenses. Range is from 40 cm to 3.5 m. Some iOS demo apps included in the package consist of an object scanner; room capture; Fetch, which is a virtual pet; and Ball Physics, an augmented reality demo with virtual balls. An SDK is available.
The Downsides The creator has recently said that the technology is still in development and some planned features haven’t been implemented yet. We’re concerned about the lack of software or brackets for any Android devices, even though the creator has said it will be producing open-source drivers. We would also like to see more work go into precision measurement because we think that an architect planning a remodel, for example, is going to want the same kind of tolerances as are available in laser measurement.
The Upsides Occipital has been involved in panorama-creation apps and a successful shopping-scanner app, so it’s familiar with the spatial and optical-scanning area. The project creator has said it has already inked agreements with manufacturers and suppliers and is almost ready to start manufacturing a run of beta sensors. We like the way that the creator has plans to simply redesign the bracket rather than the entire scanner assembly as new mobile devices come to market.
The Numbers After launching a Kickstarter project on Sept. 17, Occipital already had more than 2,000 backers a week later pledging more than US$700,000 of a $100,000 goal. So, its funding goal has been achieved. The funding period ends Nov. 1. Pledge rewards range from a T-shirt for $25 to a Structure Sensor in your choice of silver or blue, a USB hacker cable, drivers and open CAD models for $349 — everything, in other words, that you need to develop with the iPad.
Underlying Concepts Kinect and Structure Sensor both work on the same principal – one shared also with golfing and shooting-sports range finders – in that they send out radio signals, like laser, or infrared frequencies that bounce off objects. The returned signal is then interpreted to calculate gestures in 3D for gaming, map an object – in the case of Structure Sensor – or measure golf-hole distance. Varying levels of sophistication are employed in the resulting rendering, depending on software, that can include 3D reconstructed images and so on.
Conclusion Pre-beta, and with available demo apps only, this product is at a supremely early product life-cycle stage, but is a potentially exciting product, particularly for software and app developers.
Posted in Smartphone Tagged with: 35, 3D Printer, Apple, architects, CAD, camera, iOS, ipad, Mobile Devices, object scanner, occipital, optics, sensor, shopping, tablet
August 6th, 2013 by Admin
In Canada, the game to corner mobile payment systems and the Digital Wallet is being played seriously. PayPal and Square are present but the 800 pound gorilla may have just entered the ring. Canadian banks are presenting merchant accounts capable of handling tap to pay transactions competing directly with Square and PayPal. Royal Bank of Canada has launched a mobile payment solution to provide contactless payment using Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled smartphones and tablets. Shoppers can simply wave their smartphone over a cash register or payment terminal and be on their way. No more swiping a credit card into a terminal or punching keys into a terminal and no more fumbling with cash or coins to settle a payment. Read more of this article »
Posted in Credit card Processing Tagged with: bank, bankers, blackberry, Canada, Canadian, Canadian travel agency agents, digital, electronic, financial services, ipad, Iphone, mobile, nfc, payments, PayPal, Rogers Communications, Royal Bank, smartphone, Square, tablet, travel
As a society, our smartphones are increasingly becoming a more important in our daily lives. Already replacing watches, alarm clocks, wallets and calendars today we carry our smartphones with us everywhere, including the bathroom. While smartphone users are traveling everywhere with their smartphones, are they actually booking travel with their smartphones? eMarketer asked that very question in a survey of 1,200 internet users and asked about their travel booking habits on the internet. The responses indicate that 40% of digital travel researchers will use their smartphones and tablets and mobile payments to complete travel bookings. Read more of this article »
Posted in Merchant Services Account Tagged with: agencies, agent, agents, credit card, e-commerce, gateway, ipad, Iphone, laptop, merchant account, notebook, smartphone, tablet, ticketless, travel
Cyber Crime InfoGraphic by Vericode.
Today anyone can have an e-commerce web site set up in mere minutes. There are a lot of open source e-commerce solutions that allow a web site owner to establish a site very easily, some require just a few clicks to get going. Once you have your color scheme chosen and your navigation all set a decision on how to accept payments is inevitable. e-commerce payment gateways allow your site to connect securely to a payment processor to accept your electronic transactions. These digital transactions can be used by hackers to target your site and your customers credit card information and much more. Whether the data targeted is stored on the merchants network or on the customers mobile device, business need to implement a cyber security strategy. Read more of this article »
Posted in Credit Card Security Tagged with: credit card, DSS, e-commerce, electronic, fraud, gateway, Malware, payment, PCI, Phishing, Processing, Security, Skimming, smartphone, SMSishing, tablet
The SD Association has a new ‘smart’ idea. New Micro SD cards, popular for use in Android smartphones and tablet devices, will soon be available. The new MicroSD cards will carry the NFC Secure Element which allows Near Field Communications smartphones communicate with a chip on the Micro SD card. These are mainly used in a digital wallet for electronic transactions known as m-commerce. The new SD Cards also support on-board applets for smartphones as well.
Many newer phones are shipping with NFC Radios mainly used with digital wallets. For security, Near Field Communication requires a special authentication method prior to encrypted communications. Now that can be be placed on a Micro SD in addition to additional memory for the smartphone or tablet. The card can also store small digital wallet applications for digital payments when combined with an NFC enabled phone or tablet. These are seen by consumers as a way to ditch plastic cards in favor of digital wallets, and you can also transfer the electronic wallet to different devices as you please.
Additionally the SDA supports Micro SD cards that have both the Secure Element security chip on board as well as a Near Field Communications Radio on the chip to give NFC capabilities to devices that don’t come with the technology. Changing devices seems even easier with these cards as they enable NFC on multiple devices as the user transfers the card. If the MicroSD card owner switches cellular carriers, the card can easily go from the old phone to a new one and the digital wallet user never skips a beat.
The SD Association claims that microSD cards account for 95% of all mobile memory card shipments and that 78% of all mobile phone shipments today have the microSD memory card slot. With the latest round of MicroSD cards with NFC radios and without, they hope new e-commerce and m-commerce applications are built to run on the memory cards. This greatly levels the playing field from vendor lock in as both cell phone carriers and device makers have their own aspirations toward digital payment systems.
Posted in smartSD Cards Tagged with: Android, Digital Wallet, e-commerce, m-commerce, Micro SD, microSD, near field communications, nfc, radio, Security, smartphone, smartSD Cards, tablet
