Such merchants bring high transaction volumes, reliability and security   requirements, complex self-hosted or co-located servers, databases and related systems, and integration requirements to the game.  For the last couple of years, there was little to suggest that an outsource provider of transaction processing services in this nascent Internet-based market could meet their industrial strength challenges.

Today, most large merchants use dedicated leased lines (typically one per business model or payment type that must be supported), with a server/storefront solution, and considerable custom programming.

This approach requires dedicated staff for maintenance, support, leased line certification management, and handling of various manual processes. The result is guaranteed bandwidth, and relatively high reliability and performance, at the expense of very high fixed operating costs that escalate dramatically as the solution is "scaled" to meet growing business requirements.

Merchants must gain and keep access to a financial network using a mediating service. In the traditional model, companies like ICVERIFY and Verifone, which provide products to merchants to enable access to processing networks, provide this mediating function.

Internet pioneers over the last couple years have floated different Web-centric outsource models, but tying the processing mechanisms to the still-maturing Web technology proved too limiting.  Larger merchants that tried them quickly realized they would outgrow them, possibly obsoleting certain aspects of their more closely linked internal infrastructure in the process.

An Industrial Strength, Internet-Based Solution

PaymentNet has the core competencies to deliver a service that completely and securely fulfills the automated payment processing system requirements for a Web or traditional business. The Company’s service can be easily integrated into any front-end order management system or most back-end database systems.

To provide a comparable payment service using Internet technology requires:

• Developing the secure infrastructure for transferring and storing transaction information including hardware and software.

• Building Internet gateways to support all major transaction types.

• Establishing relationships with financial networks to enable merchant’s gateway access to processors.

• Building the interface between the merchant’s online order system and the financial gateway.

• Building the back-end database system to manage transactions.

Businesses should weigh carefully the costs required for deployment and ongoing maintenance of an internally developed solution against the benefits of outsourcing.

For a large-volume price comparison, send email to PaymentNet Sales.