The question on everybody’s mind is – should I allow Bitcoin as a payment form on my website? This brainchild of the pseudonymous Satoshi Namakamoto has soared from zero to hero in a very short time period. Worth barely a cent in the first year of its career (2009-2010), finally reaching dollar value in 2011, nobody saw any potential in this wildly fluctuating cryptocurrency. That is, until the bubble grew to enormous sizes in 2013, at one point reaching over $1200. But what does that mean for the future of Bitcoin? That’s what we’re going to discuss briefly.
If you are a merchant, you definitely care about the security of your online transactions. One of the ways to achieve that is implementing 3-D Secure. The name probably rings a bell but if not, let us give you a short summary of what it is, together with the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.
3-D Secure – Visa and MasterCard Security Standard
3-D Secure system is a set of security standards developed by Visa, but implemented also by other card organizations. The Visa system is called Verified by Visa and the MasterCard system is offered as MasterCard SecureCode. In a nutshell, if 3-D Secure is implemented then straight after entering customer’s card information, he or she is asked to enter a password which helps the card issuer to identify the card holder.
Awards, rankings, competitions. Who doesn’t like to win? And when your brand gets an award, it’s something more than just a medal or a statue. It’s a confirmation that your clients, business partners and fans appreciate your product. And you can be sure that you’re doing a good job developing your online business.
Spanish is one of the most popular languages in the world (second or third place, depending on source – 407 millions of people spoke Spanish in 2010 according to Wikipedia) so think of the potential that this market has!
Not only English
It is quite probable that some of your customers are Spanish-speaking people. Or they could be your customers, if you talked to them in their language. I’ve already wrote why it is worth to use customers’ language so now I can just remind the main reasons. English is considered to be an international language, modern lingua franca, but if you want to expand to domestic markets efficiently, you should speak your customers’ mother tongues. Here’s why: …
As a seller, you’ve got a wide range of products or services. They are of excellent quality. So why would your potential customers be struggling with the final decision? The answer is simple: there are thousands of sellers like you out there and you need to make sure to stand out so that these potential buyers become your customers. For the sake of this article, let’s just call them customers.
Here are some good practices to incorporate into your business in order to convince your customers to buy from you: …
Nowadays, with constantly increasing number of online transactions and better consumer awareness (which is great!), it is important things are under control.
The cardholders are entitled to invoke a chargeback procedure. This may be carried out in the event their merchant does not perform a contract for the items they have paid for or when their card has been used for a non-authorized payment. While this option is extremely convenient and safe for the cardholders, it is less fun for the merchants to deal with such a request.
Agreed, it is the issuer bank’s duty to take this up, on the other hand, it will be the merchant who will be charged for each procedure. Unless they have strong arguments that the chargeback shouldn’t have been initiated in the first place.
So you have decided to start your own online store. Excellent choice. But do you know what type of e-commerce platform to pick? From open source (OS) to dedicated platforms to Software as a Service (SaaS), there is indeed a variety of options to choose from. What is the best solution in your case?
Let’s go through the mentioned options with their pros and cons.
If you run an international e-business and sell goods globally, you do your best to make the purchasing process as simple and as fast as possible. When your online business is developing and the number of customers, transactions and revenues is increasing, there is nothing worse than payment limits that can stop you. But sometimes the bank can reject transactions (because of business or customer location, payments method, currencies, etc.). If a consumer lives in the UK and suddenly shops in Japan, the bank can treat it as a fraud transaction, because, for example, such card activity may not correspond with their purchasing history. It’s all in order to ensure the money’s safety. Banks sometimes reject payments when they suspect a card might have been stolen. But it’s a big problem for e-businesses. When a transaction is rejected, you lose money and customers.
How to avoid such problems?
The best way is to create more than one merchant account and integrate them in one clever payment system. And that’s what we prepared: Automatic Payment Optimizer. It is a mechanism that groups all merchant accounts of a given online business and sends money to the right one. If a bank rejects a transaction, APO attempts to send the funds to other bank accounts until it succeeds and receives a positive response. All this happens automatically and takes just a few seconds.
To try Automatic Payment Optimizer contact PayLane info@paylane.com
As you might already know, we have recently released a new API here at PayLane. The reason we’ve done that we wanted our API to be accessible in any way possible – no matter which programming language or platform you would use to integrate with us. How have we achieved that?
We started to be more RESTful :)
What is REST?
In plain English, REST is an API design standard and technology that standardizes how API should be made and how it should work. But what is more important – the basic principles of REST say that your interfaces should not be tied/connected to any specific technology or language. Also, you really should focus on keeping your API as simple as possible in terms of its usage – you are giving access to your application to your future customers – do not let them down! RESTful APIs take a good use of what’s already there – the HTTP protocol. If we want to be more specific, they use basic Internet protocols to communicate with the outside world – and that’s pretty much all you need to know about it.
PayLane presents a new version of the Developer Zone – a place for developers and entrepreneurs. There, you’ll find how to easily implement payments on your website and which payment services are worth trying out. It’s more than just a documentation – we show how to implement specific actions, so you just have to choose the desired example.
You can also download e-commerce plugins, learn how to make your payment methods suit your business model or try out a request demo.
Don’t feel like reading?
No problem, here’s a PayLane Developer Zone Guide:
We often encourage to implement payments using API. This way the whole payment process takes place on your website and is fully customizable, while PayLane stays completely invisible to your customers.
If you’re just beginning your adventure with REST, get our free whitepaper. Read about REST and RESTful APIs, learn why this is the right way to go.
If you are a merchant, you definitely care about the security of your online transactions. One of the ways to achieve that is implementing 
As a seller, you’ve got a wide range of products or services. They are of excellent quality. So why would your potential customers be struggling with the final decision? The answer is simple: there are thousands of sellers like you out there and you need to make sure to stand out so that these potential buyers become your customers. For the sake of this article, let’s just call them customers.
As you might already know, we have recently released a new API here at PayLane. The reason we’ve done that we wanted our API to be accessible in any way possible – no matter which programming language or platform you would use to integrate with us. How have we achieved that?