Payment Processing Made Easy: an article
In advance of the training event, referenced below, Destination.net author Shari Gould has written an article entitled Payment Processing Made Easy. The article itself, located here, is an excellent primer of the material that I will be covering in the event.
There are several quotes in the article that I find particularly compelling:
You were probably never asked (or never expected) to become payment processing and security experts as an application developer, yet the chances are ever increasing you’ll be asked to integrate commerce components into your applications that satisfy the new security standards of numerous credit card and payment processing companies.
In my experience, having spent a fair amount of time interacting with the Software Development community (both in my current role as evangelist and in previous lives as designer, DBA, Network Administrator, SE, etc), one of the greatest challenges facing the ISV community is reacting to customer requests. It is very easy to get "distracted" from core business by continually adding features. With that said, there is also a need to react to customer demands to ensure that they remain loyal. Payment capabilities are, often, one of those requests that falls by the wayside due to a combination of the developer being unfamiliar with the requirements and the inherent complexity in payments integration. The complexity, however, is no longer a gating factor…
The challenge lies in the plethora of credit card processing providers which all have different formats used to accept payments from customers. In an ideal world, you should be able to write one credit card acceptance application that communicates with many different processing companies’ systems. Software developers need a platform and toolkit that simplifies the process of developing credit card acceptance workflows, while adhering to the latest security standards.
This is a major part of the reason that IP Commerce exists. The market that we serve (Service Providers, Software Companies, Distribution Channels) have unique business challenges that need addressed. For the Software Company, the above…for the Service Provider, gaining reach into the highly integrated solutions developed by the Software Company is a requirement for scale…for the Distribution Channel, they desire to sell more software and customers demand payments capabilities. The IP Commerce Platform and Toolkits are designed to align the interest of these audiences while ensuring protection of competitive advantage for each.
One last quote before I simply copy/paste the entire article…
Commerce Toolkit for Applications helps developers reduce development time to create security-enhanced payment applications. The Toolkit provides an interface, based on service-orientation, to the IP Commerce Platform, allowing developers to payment-enable applications without expensive integrations for each disparate payment processor.
The toolkit truly does provide the "write once, use many" style of design that, when I was still coding, I required. The investment in one-off integrations (whether payments, DBMS back-ends, ERP solutions, etc) simply does not scale either in the smallest development shop or in the enterprise
If you want to learn more about commerce, starting with the fundamentals, I encourage you to register for the upcoming webinar here.
What’s your perspective? Agree? Disagree? Anything to add? Critiques?
The comment form is below. . .
June 3, 2008