Ten Reasons Why a Payment Gateway is Better for Your Business

1. Card on file. Merchants have a secure way to store credit/debit card and checking account details so they can charge their regular customers without requiring them to present a card or check.
2. Email receipts.  With a gateway merchants can send receipts their customers can easily store electronically.
3. No extra hardware to maintain. Why have multiple devices to manage and pay for when most businesses have personal computers on site already?
4. Unlimited users who can log on from anywhere.  With the merchant's express permission, their bookkeeper can log in from their office to get transaction reports, clerks can log on from the front desk to process payments and merchants can log in from any Internet connection to check on the business from anywhere in the world. 
5. PCI Compliance. Most payment gateways are continually updated to remain fully PCI compliant while most existing POS terminals simply aren’t PCI DSS compliant.  After the massive recent data breaches with Global Payments, Sony et al., this issue will become increasingly important as the card associations start cracking down on non-compliance.
6. Customer Data at your fingertips. Gateways  generally support loading customer information which gives the merchant a great way to communicate with their customers for promotions and loyalty.
7. Re-Occurring Payments . With a gateway re-occurring payments need only to be entered one time, and told how often to occur. 
8. Doesn’t tie up a phone line.  Standard POS terminals use phone lines to communicate with the processor which requires merchants to either lose their line while the transactions process or get a second phone line which is often times more expensive than the monthly fee for a gateway.
9. Rental/lease fees.  Merchants often pay $30-$80/month to rent or lease their POS terminals which is more expensive than simply using a payment gateway.
10. Marketing.  With a gateway, receipts can be printed on preprinted sheets that market the Merchant’s business. They are larger than normal receipts so a consumer will be more inclined to keep them and respond to a marketing message than if it’s printed on a small POS terminal receipt.   What a great way to incent your customers to save your marketing message.  With a VPOS, you can actually turn your credit card processing into a great new way to make grow your business! 

Every Processing Company's Niightmare

Global Payments announced Friday that 1.5 million credit card numbers from its systems may have been exposed after detecting “unauthorized access” into its processing system. Global is a processing company that moves the money around for the parties involved in a credit card transaction.  The company said that 1.5 million records may have been exposed, from Visa and MasterCard. Global said that while credit card numbers may have been exposed, personal information such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers were “not obtained by the criminals.”


Global detected the breach in “early March,” but has not specified when exactly the attack took place or how it happened. According to the latest statement released by Global, the breach has been “contained.” The company said it is working with “industry third parties, regulators and law enforcement to assist in the efforts to minimize potential cardholder impact.” It is also working with security and forensics firms to get to the bottom of the access.

Visa Inc. has dropped the card processor involved in a massive data breach from its registry of providers that meet data security standards.

Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia noted that the company continues to process Visa transactions, but that being dropped from the registry “could give our partners some pause that they’re doing business with someone who experienced a breach.”

The company said it will set up a website later Monday to help consumers who might be affected by the breach. Visa and Mastercard's systems were not compromised.

The company said it continues to work with regulators, industry third parties and law enforcement to help in the effort to minimize the potential impact on credit cardholders.