Payment Enhancements
After you have implemented the basic initial transactions that you need in your system, you can consider what kind of enhancements you want to add to your payments. These enhancements would help you improve the payer experience and minimize the risks for your business.
Payment enhancement methods
You can enhance your payments with:
- Improvements for payer experience
- Easier Payer authentication
- Details about the ordered goods or services
- Additional data to improve interchange rates or meet payments compliance.
Improvements for payer experience
To improve the overall payer experience on your web site and with your business, you can use the following enhancements for your payments:
- Add descriptions for account statements
You can help reduce chargebacks and ensure that the payer can easily recognize the payment made to you on their account or bank statement by including a descriptor text in your request. The bank adds this descriptor to the payer’s statement for that transaction. Use the order.statementDescriptor object in the request body. For more information, see Statement Descriptor Data. - Store the payment details to serve returning customers
You can provide better services for returning customers by storing the payment details of your payer with their approval. These customers do not need to enter their payment details again on your web site.
You can use various tokenization services to store the payer’s payment details in the gateway. When the payer returns to your web site, you can display the masked card number to allow the payer to determine whether they want to use the same card. And when you send the payment transaction, you can include the token only, as the gateway already has the related card details.
Easier authentication
Streamlined payment interactions including authentication, increases success rates whilst reducing fraud.
To enhance the security of your payments:
- If you are managing card-not-present transactions, consider providing data about the Internet connection the payer is using, such as their IP address and hostname. This may assist transaction filtering or risk management systems to better assess the transaction. For more information, see Customer Internet Data.
- If you are using 3D Secure (3DS) authentication for your card payments, aim to provide extra details in the request about the payer’s purchase history. This can increase the chances of the Access Control Server (ACS) authenticating the payer using the frictionless flow instead of requiring the challenge flow and additional actions from the payer. For more information on the relevant fields, see 3DS Authentication.
Details about the ordered goods or services
You can add various kinds of details about the goods or services that the payer is ordering into the initial request. You can provide details about the order in general and about individual line items included in it.
Use the order and order.item[n] objects in the request body for these details. For more information, see Order and Line-Item Data.
If you provide airline-, cruising-, or healthcare-related services, you can define additional details about these services:
- For airline data, such as flights, passengers, tickets, and itineraries, use the airline object in the request body. For more information, see Airline Data.
- For cruising data, such as cruise, ship, passengers, and travel agent, use the cruise object in the request body. For more information, see Cruise Data.
- For healthcare data, such as approved vision, dental, and prescription purchases, use the order.item[n] object in the request body. For more information, see Healthcare Data.
You can store these details in the gateway, retrieve this information with the individual transactions or orders, or include it in reports and download it from the gateway. The information is useful to support and streamline business processes, such as reconciliation and reporting.
If you are using browser-based alternative payment methods, you can also display some of the order and line-item data on the payment method provider’s web site. This provides extra confidence for the payer to accept the payment and finalize the order.
Additional data to improve interchange rates
Adding more data to your request can save cost, especially if you are accepting card payments. Providing more details in your request body helps the card issuer to determine whether to accept the payment and consequently result in better interchange rates for you.
If you accept business, corporate, or purchase cards, you can consider adding the following to your request body:
- Enhanced transaction data, such as customer reference number, invoice number, and sales tax amount.
- Order line-item details.
For more information about the exact data to provide and the fields to use, see Level 2 and Level 3 Data.