Enabling ecommerce payments doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. Here’s how to do it without the pain.

Brick-and-mortar merchants forced to expand into ecommerce — and outside their comfort zones — will appreciate the simplicity and ease of hosted payments. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who give merchants this option for accepting online payments will add significant value to the solutions they provide, now and in the future, as it appears there’s no end in sight to ecommerce growth. Furthermore, hosted payments are an easy way for developers to enable ecommerce for their clients while saving development time and effort.

Analysts from eMarketer report that global ecommerce sales totaled $2.382 trillion in 2017 and rose to $4.206 trillion in 2020. Additionally, ecommerce has steadily represented more of total retail sales, increasing from 10.4% of sales in 2017 and rising to 18.1% in 2021. The pandemic drove rapid ecommerce growth over the past two years;  however, as people return to in-person shopping, ecommerce is still gaining ground. eMarketer looks for ecommerce to total $6.542 trillion worldwide by 2023 and represent 22% of total retail sales.

Brick-and-mortar merchants who want to remain competitive must accept orders and payments online, and hosted payments allow you to quickly integrate payments with your clients’ websites so they can do business online.

However, your clients entering uncharted ecommerce territory may be driving you to expand your horizons as well. It’s particularly true for ISV businesses that primarily provided on-premises solutions integrated with card-present payments in the past. Here’s what you need to know about hosted payments and how they can help your clients and your development team make a smooth transition to ecommerce.

Even though a hosted payments page may look like it’s part of the merchant’s website, it isn’t. It’s hosted by the payments company, and sensitive payment data is never entered into or stored on the merchant’s system. This feature gives ISVs the additional advantage of minimizing Payment Card Industry (PCI) scope. Because payment data never flows through or is stored in your software, your team doesn’t have to meet the burden of PCI Data Security Standard compliance. Your payments partner ensures PCI compliance on all transactions, saving your team time and effort.

In addition, you don’t need to work with a third party to enable payments on your clients’ ecommerce websites. You can work directly with your payments partner who provides hosted payments.

You can approach hosted payments in three primary ways.

Plugins are available for some websites, such as North American Bancard’s WooCommerce plugin for WordPress sites. With this option, your client applies for a merchant processing account and receives a merchant ID (MID). In addition to the user-friendly features, plugins are also flexible, allowing your clients to customize their online stores, and it’s a secure way to offer products and accept payments online. WooCommerce also allows retailers to manage their online businesses from a mobile app, anytime, anywhere.

Another option is to embed payments in an iFrame on the merchant’s website. For example, North American Bancard’s Pay Now Pay Page collects customers’ payment card numbers and verification values (i.e., CVV, CVC, or CSC) and manages the checkout process. Once a transaction is processed, the iFrame page returns tokenized payment data to the host page.

With an iFrame payment page, software can use API calls to enable the merchant to manage refunds and voids with secure transaction tokens.

If your client needs more flexibility to customize the appearance of the payments page so that it reflects their business’ branding and the look and feel of the rest of the website, a custom payment form may be the best choice. A custom payment form also allows merchants to take different payment types, including credit, debit, ACH, and peer-to-peer payments.

Some coding is required with this option. You make the form in HTML and submit it to the payments company to be hosted separately. The software will need to use secondary API calls to enable the merchant to use tokens for reporting, refunds, and “remembering” the customer for future purchases.

If you thought that enabling payments on your clients’ ecommerce website will require a long, complicated, labor-intensive integration process, the hosted payments option will put your mind at ease. Hosted payments are quick and easy — you won’t have to be a bottleneck that delays your clients’ plans to do business online. Additionally, some options are so easy that people without development experience can set them up.

Hosted payments are designed to make it easy for your clients to enter the ecommerce space. Moreover, by providing great advice about a simple path to doing business online, you can continue to build a strong relationship with your users.

Contact North American Bancard to learn more about adding value to the solutions you provide with hosted payments.

This article was originally published on developer.paymenthub.com.

Robert Weinrich is a business systems analyst at North American Bancard.