Unfortunately, it's quite common for a merchant to spend too heavily on staff resources for manually handling aspects of their payment processing.  One or two manual steps in the process can consume large amounts of precious staff resources on a recurring, continual basis.  True automated payment processing should do considerably more than handle authorizations and credits.

The Case for Real-Time Automated Processing
Over 86% of all Internet transactions are processed offline (manually) via email, phone or fax. According to the market research firm ActivMedia, nearly a third of all online merchants are going to implement or upgrade their E-Commerce systems, investing up to $23.6 billion by 2002 to upgrade their E-commerce automation.

The case for using the efficiencies of the Internet to automate payment processing is strong. It has proven to cut down errors, and save time and money. For electronics distributor Beamscope Canada, the cost to process a Web order is about 80 cents, while the cost for taking a live order is about $5 to $15 (CIO, Web Business, Feb. 1998).

Cases In Point
One example is Landmark Communications, a company with requirements to process thousands of transactions weekly. Landmark had been using a leading Payment Service Provider (PSP) to process transactions in a recurring billing model, but found the process too time consuming to effectively meet the company’s needs. After rigorous testing of the PaymentNet solution, Landmark made the decision to move its processing to PaymentNet. The PaymentNet test enabled Landmark to reduce their recurring billing time for 5,000 transactions from over 3 hours to fewer than 18 minutes.

Another merchant that recently switched to PaymentNet is Value America. Value America performed a benchmark test of the PaymentNet service against another leading PSP. For 11,000 transactions, the average response time for PaymentNet was 3.2 seconds and over one minute for the other provider. Value America found that PaymentNet's competitor system returned false negative responses on transactions. PaymentNet also won on ease-of-installation.  It took only a couple of hours to integrate a proof of concept with PaymentNet, but it took several days of an incomplete attempt to upgrade to our competitor's new  "thin-client" software version.

The Details
Here is a representative list of automation services provided by PaymentNet.  Please contact us to learn more about these features and how they can benefit your payment processing operations.

• Transaction authorization:  PaymentNet returns the authorization results to the online consumer.
• Automatic funds settlement.
• Secure storage of transaction information, eliminating the need for the merchant to store information on the merchant’s server.
• Support for multiple transaction types.
• Virtual point-of-sale support for merchant transaction management.
• Merchant Administration Site.