Marble and stone manufacturers and distributors that use traditional payment technology will suffer from higher credit card processing fees, PCI Compliance problems, and increased fraud risk. This article identifies the main problems and how to fix them.
PCI Compliance Problems
It’s a fact there will be card not present transactions. Credit card authorization forms have been a primary tool to mitigate fraud risk, but they’re a PCI compliance nightmare:
- Merchants cannot request CVV2 on any paper form, even if it will be destroyed later. (Visa Core Rules October 2014). Without CVV2, the merchant will lose any future fraudulent card dispute.
- Forms contain sensitive data. It’s virtually impossible to keep the signature on file and be PCI Compliant.
- Employees have access to credit card numbers
- The receiving fax needs to be secured, and if digital, any memory securely wiped when the machine is replaced.
PCI Compliance Solutions
- PCI compliant credit card authorization form for variable recurring billing
- Tokenization to store card data outside ERP and other software to reduce scope and burden
- Customers self-payment solutions so employees have no access to card data. Options include online hosted pay page and electronic bill presentment & payment (See also How to get CVV2 and be PCI Compliant)
Mixed Retail and Card Not Present Transaction Interchange Rate Problems
When a merchant has a retail merchant account, magnetic stripe data is expected with the transaction. When it’s not included, the merchant pays higher non-qualified interchange fees. There are no desktop terminals, and few cloud based solutions that support level III processing for retail transactions. This is significant because most cards that qualify are MasterCard and the average savings is .75%.
When a merchant has a MOTO (mail and phone order) merchant account, and then swipes a card, they get the benefit of a signed receipt, but not the benefit of lower swiped merchant fees.
Mixed Retail and Card Not Present Transaction Interchange Rate Solutions
Marble and Stone merchants MUST have a solution with interchange rate optimization that solves the above and numerous other issues related to omnichannel credit card processing.
Multiple Locations, Centralized Billing Problems
With centralized billing, when there’s a dispute, the merchant needs to present the signed receipt. It’s time consuming and inefficient to store and locate paper receipts.
Multiple Locations, Centralized Billing Solutions
Signature capture terminals are essential. Mobile is not an acceptable substitute for signature capture, because marble and stone merchants benefit from pin debit and other optimization capabilities that are only possible with multi-lane terminals. EMV, NFC and P2PE are recommended.
CenPOS is the only payment gateway and payment engine that solves every problem listed above. CenPOS has solved these problems for years, while Authorize.net, Paypal, Payflow Pro, and even newer alternative gateways have not caught up. Contact Christine Speedy 954-942-0483 for sales and ERP or other software integrations.