Reducing risk again…and again…and again

A returning customer – surely the holy grail for all ecommerce merchants. A customer uses your website and likes what they purchase. Soon they’re back to make another.

So how can you make that process as smooth as possible? And how can you ensure your transactions remain secure, even while you streamline?

The subscription model can of course be especially useful for companies in the entertainment and publishing industries, letting their customers make one regular payment and then use the site’s services as often as they like. Also known as recurring payments and continuous authority transactions, they grant you to charge a card weekly, monthly or quarterly – whenever you like.

They’re easy to set up and maintain, are convenient for your customers and your business, and because you don’t store the card details, you still don’t need to worry about PCI DSS compliance. Secure Trading offers a recurring payments solution that is managed via MyST.

For customers who don’t want to set up a regular subscription, our card store and tokenisation solution could be the answer.

These solutions provide you with a reference number, or token, that is used in place of the customer’s credit or debit card number on all future transactions. Tokenisation allows you to generate the token as part of the transaction itself, while card store allows you to generate it without a transaction, for example via customer registration.

Once your customer has initially registered a credit or debit with you, Secure Trading sends you a unique token to store. This token is then used to call up the customer’s details the next time they visit your site.

This new transaction (or repeat) can be for a new amount, have a new order reference or even new order details; all you should do is ask the customer for their CVV2 code. But even this is optional!

The key benefit of using card store or tokenisation is clear; as the token is used in place of the card number you don’t have to incur the expense of developing your system to store data in a PCI compliant manner. It is estimated that using a tokenisation solution you can cut your PCI compliance bill by more than 50%.

For more information, why not speak to our sales team today?