Running a business shouldn’t mean navigating a maze of payment options. But the sheer variety of ways there are to pay today puts pressure on businesses to accommodate every option—or risk losing a sale.
To meet this challenge, many businesses with simple payment needs are turning to payment gateways for businesses, which help them seamlessly accept a wide range of payment types. These systems manage the entire transaction process, from the moment a payment is initiated at the point of sale to when it’s submitted to the processor. Payment gateways can accept credit and debit cards, eChecks, digital wallets, contactless payments, and transactions made online or via mobile.
You can simplify things even further by choosing a payment gateway that also provides a merchant account. Authorize.net has an all‑in‑one solution that means you don’t need to separately contract with a bank or third-party processor to get set up. This can speed up onboarding, reduce administrative overhead, and give you a single point of contact for both payment processing and gateway support. For small and mid‑sized businesses, this often translates to faster access to funds, fewer integration headaches, and a more streamlined payment experience overall.
But it’s not just about convenience. A payment gateway can give you access to more innovative payment experiences that let you capture more sales, give you greater control over the payment process, enhance fraud prevention, and access to a wealth of data to drive your strategies.
How to Keep Up With Innovation
Payment gateways are creating better ways to serve their users all the time. Visa’s recent relaunch of Authorize.net introduced features that make it even more user friendly, with an updated interface that’s seamless to navigate, a customizable dashboard, and an AI support tool with expanding capabilities.
Authorize.net has also optimized its merchant onboarding, withpricing templates that reduce repetitive tasks and minimize errors, plus a portfolio default that automatically generates sales profiles for a seamless start every time.
How to Accept More Kinds of Payments
Authorize.net is currently one of the most popular payment gateways for businesses, supporting 400,000+ small to mid-size businesses in the U.S.
Today’s shoppers expect their preferred payment method—whether it’s a physical credit card, a digital wallet, or something else—to be accepted wherever they shop. In addition to online purchases, in-person point-of-sale transactions have also grown more complex. Consumers may want to pay with a gift card, tap to pay, or even use cash. At one time, investing in hardware to handle all these options required significant effort.
But gateways like Authorize.net can provide a virtual point-of-sale (VPOS) that allows you to connect a compatible card reader to a computer. You can simply log in and start accepting payments. This flexibility gives you the ability to stay up to speed with trends and offer customers a way to pay that feels right for them.
How to Manage Recurring Payments
Recurring payments have long been a challenge for businesses looking to save customers the hassle of manually re-entering billing or payment details for every transaction. The problems multiply when a customer’s card is updated or replaced and the payment information changes.
A payment gateway can communicate with the card issuer to update the card details automatically—without any input from the business. Not only does this make the process smoother, but it also helps retain customers. Repeatedly asking for payment details—or even just re-confirming a card number—gives customers an opportunity to reconsider whether they want to continue the service.
If your business is subscription-based or relies on repeat customers, look for a payment partner that offers an easy-to-use recurring billing tool. Make sure it allows you to customize billing schedules to fit your business model and includes features like trial periods so customers can try your product or service before being charged.
How to Prevent Payments Fraud
Over the next five years, analysts project that small and medium-sized businesses will lose more than $130 billion due to payments fraud, per Jupiter Research. Most businesses with simple needs would be overwhelmed trying to handle such challenges.
Consider a payment gateway that offers fraud detection capabilities, like Authorize.net. Its built-in fraud tool, Advanced Fraud Detection Suite, has 13 configurable filters to help you set things like minimum transaction thresholds, payment velocity, and country limits—so you can be vigilant against fraudulent transactions
“Every business can be a target for suspicious activity. In fact, some businesses may be more vulnerable, because they don’t have the same resources to devote to fraud prevention that larger operations do.” – Suzanne Sando, Lead Analyst of Fraud Management, Javelin Strategy & Research
How to Leverage Payments Data
Another essential feature of a payments gateway is the ability to view payment results and data at a glance. A high-quality payments dashboard should provide a clear overview of any urgent and pending tasks and offer you one-click access to common actions such as accepting payments, locating transactions, and sending invoices. And the dashboard should be customizable to fit your needs, highlighting relevant opportunities and information. It should also leverage the full range of payment data flowing through the gateway.
Compiling and analyzing payment data can be a key advantage for any business. It’s important to ensure your gateway includesvisualizations of key trends and metrics—like settled payments and transaction volumes over time—to help you focus your efforts.
“Analytics are the lifeblood of any business today. Data tells us things about a business that we may not observe anecdotally. A business owner takes hundreds or thousands of credit card transactions a month, and you’re not going to sift through them to identify patterns. A good dashboard packages them up gives you key metrics so you can see how the business is doing. What ZIP code are my customers coming from? What are the payment trends in my business? That’s the crucial kind of information a payment gateway can give you.” – Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Payments Practice, Javelin Strategy & Research
Authorize.net in Action
One business that has fully leveraged the benefits a payment gateway can provide is online mailing service Click2Mail. They’ve relied on Authorize.net for years, going beyond simply processing payments to helping improve their business operations.
When a customer enters their payment information during a purchase, it’s stored securely for future transactions, making recurring payments seamless. With Authorize.net’s Account Updater, Click2Mail can automatically update expired or reissued card details, reducing the time spent reaching out to customers for updated information.
And when a customer’s payment is declined, Authorize.net gives specific information about why the payment was unsuccessful. This helps resolve issues more quickly, reducing chargeback fees and creating a smoother experience for customers. The secure tools now immediately identify and review suspicious transactions, allowing Click2Mail to act swiftly and prevent losses. The gateway’s proactive approach allows Click2Mail to approve legitimate transactions, void fraudulent ones, and flag suspicious activity.
Click2Mail has already utilized Authorize.net’s new features, like the dashboard that groups together related tasks for easier navigation. At a glance, a Click2Mail associate can focus on customers, payments, reports, accounts, or the marketplace—whichever needs attention.
This means Click2Mail’s team can concentrate on delivering cutting-edge software solutions that simplify sending mail for their customers.
“Because the gateway’s whole business is getting the transaction from the merchant to the processor, the process can focus on that ‘first mile’ of the transaction. That lets them support more transaction types from different kinds of hardware, gives them the rich data they need, and leaves the retailer free to run their business, not the payment process.” – Apgar
Learn more about what a payment gateway like Authorize.net can do for your business.
