Digital Transactions
If you are an ISV, you know that adding payments to your solution adds value and gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace. Whether you like it or not, if your user base accepts payments, you are – by default – in the payments business and that comes with a unique set of challenges.
As a software developer you have several choices in how you choose to add payments to your solution. You can allow each merchant to pick a payments partner, but then you must integrate with both your client and the payments provider. On one hand, this is often a simpler solution since it doesn’t require you to act as a payment expert. On the other, you now have the expense and effort of an extra integration without any revenue in return.
Or you can opt to integrate payments into your solution. This choice requires an ISV to assess if they are big enough to go with a processor-direct integration or if a better fit would be to connect to a platform through an ISO that uses a gateway connection. As a rule, most ISVs have chosen to go with an ISO because they can provide an extra layer of payments expertise and support for ISVs and their merchants.
Even though this is a common way to add payments, it doesn’t mean that it’s not without a range of day-to-day operational issues: