1. Hosting a payment page means that customer credit card and other personal details will be transmitted by your servers, even if they are not necessarily stored there which in turn makes the PCI-DSS certification a requirement for your business
2. Becoming PCI DSS certified involves a large investment in security and anti-fraud mechanisms in order to make absolutely sure that the customer details, are safely handled – a labor intensive exercise, especially if you are a small-medium sized merchant, with funds that could be used elsewhere
3. Payment processing providers are already certified and will shoulder this burden for you. Think about how relieved you would feel if you did not have to worry about risking heavy legal actions and having your reputation ruined because of a credit card data breach
4. Tokenization allows you to establish a database of your clients’ credit card details without any fear of being hacked. This is because only an encrypted token and the last 4 digits on the credit card are kept on your side enabling you to charge the card details of your choice whenever you want to by sending the token to the payment processor. Not only is the token useless to criminal opportunists, but having this information allows you to bill a card on file and schedule automatic Payments
6. The concerns that merchants often have about looking unprofessional by not hosting their own payment pages and suffering customer drop-offs can be addressed with a few creative options:
- The look and feel of the payment page can be adapted to reflect the merchant’s brand even though the page still belongs to and is hosted on the processor’s server
- The I-Frame is a more advanced option and provides a trick of the eye whereby the payment page is still hosted on the processor’s server but it appears to be hosted on the merchant’s site. Even though the URL in the address bar belongs to the merchant (when you click “pay”), payment details are actually entered on the processor’s server
6. The payment processor hosted payment page are (or should be) really well designed and optimized in order to increase conversion. Some processors even provide you with real A/B testing platform to enable you to precisely measure any change you make to the payment page in real time!
We hope that this helps you in your decision and suggest that you locate our insight entitled What happens after the “pay button” is selected? For more information about payment pages (whether you or your processor is doing the hosting).
Image courtesy of Flickr
