Reports confirm that consumer spending online and from mobile phones is growing at a rapid pace. Merchants who want to capture every possible sale are looking for secure online and mobile payments without footing the bill for card data security compliance.
Online retail spending reached $36.3 billion for the third quarter of 2011, up 13 percent from 2010, according to comScore, Inc. The digital measurement and analytical firm also reported that U.S. online holiday spending for 2011 hit $19.6 billion in the first 34 days of the November-December shopping season, up 15 percent from the previous year.
Mobile commerce sales are expected to hit $31 billion by 2015, according to a December, 2011, eMarketer analyst report.
“There’s no question that mobile commerce is growing at a fast clip and mobile acts as an engine of overall ecommerce growth, by converting potential brick-and-mortar sales to digital sales as consumers use their smart phones while shopping in-store,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer principal analyst.
Keeping up is pretty easy with a comprehensive solution such as Mercury HostedCheckout™ for ecommerce, mcommerce and point-of-sale (POS). Integration by POS software developers offers merchants a customizable payment page on their website, where card data is collected for secure payment processing by Mercury.
A POS software developer who provides their own hosted ecommerce, mcommerce or POS solution to merchants may be considered a service provider by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. If so, they are required to complete costly and time-consuming PCI compliance audits of their hosting environment.
Mercury HostedCheckout™ shifts the responsibility of handling sensitive card holder data to Mercury, helping remove both software developers and merchants from the scope of the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Mercury’s proprietary tokenization technology handles all transactions without storing sensitive card holder data. Supported browsers include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. The POS solution includes an optimized version for Apple iPad. Mobile phones include iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
Besides the obvious applications by retailers and restaurateurs, secure hosted payments open doors for municipalities, utilities and other organizations that want to expedite online and mobile payments without incurring additional card data security compliance costs.