Consumer-facing businesses, by necessity, have evolved into consumer-centric ones. Merchants are doing all they can to tailor experiences to meet their customers’ needs and demands to win their business and their loyalty. Payment solutions play a big role in optimizing those experiences, helping to make them as convenient and frictionless as possible. Advancements in payment technology have also allowed merchants to meet customers wherever they are, capturing sales at the point of engagement, whether in-store, online, mobile, or unattended.

Payment features and functionality available today definitely provide benefits to merchants, but for value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs), the need for all types of payments on a range of channels can add a layer of complexity to providing your clients with payment solutions.

The Answer: a Modular Payment Solution

You know all too well that some payments integration vendors offer one, inflexible solution. Partnering with these vendors can back you into the corner of having to cobble together a solution with third-party add-ons to meet all of your clients’ needs. The result may be a solution that allows the merchant to accept various types of payments on multiple channels — but one that lacks integration. So, your client has to toggle between multiple dashboards and take more time than should be necessary to do the books.

It may also mean that different parts of the solution have security standards, adding management complexity and delivering different types of customer experiences on some channels.

Unlike a platform with a take-it-or-leave-it feature set, a modular payment solution gives you flexibility. The platform allows you to add any of the modules to need, combining them into a perfectly integrated payments system that makes management and reporting easy.

Your solution will also have the same level of security for all transactions and give customers consistent experiences across channels — for example, tokenized payment data can be used to make in-store returns of online purchases quicker and easier.

Furthermore, a modular payment solution doesn’t force your client to pay for features they don’t need to get the features they do need. Modules can be offered a la carte to create the right solution at the right price.

Benefits of Modular Payment Solutions for Your Business

In addition to offering the advantages of modular payment solutions to merchants, they also have some plusses for VARs and ISVs. You can differentiate your business with the ability to create unique, end-to-end solutions for your clients and deploy them faster than if you needed to track down third-party vendors.

VARs/ISVs can offer add-on features like offline processing, validated point to point encryption, loyalty, gift, ecommerce integration and more value-added services via ala carte pricing. This keeps the base cost of the payments solution as low as possible while creating opportunities for enhancement based on each merchant’s unique requirements.

Your restaurant clients can accept their customers’ preferred payment methods tableside as well as online when their customers order for delivery. Your retail clients can use payment data on all channels for greater visibility that helps them personalize experiences or recurring billing for layaways. And your salon clients can accept online payments for products or services, as well as secure payments at the time of service. A modular payments solution allows you to do it all — and do it all through the same payments integration partner.

You may even find that you can grow your business with a greater ability to innovate and upsell merchants with new functionality as their businesses expand or respond to new consumer demands.

Payments Shouldn’t Be All or Nothing

If the transition to omnichannel, customer-centricity has proven anything, it’s that one payment solution doesn’t fit all. It’s vital that merchants have the payment capabilities they need to provide the right experiences and send a message to their customers that their payment capabilities are up-to-date and secure.

Tailor-make the solutions you provide to your merchant clients, building on a modular payment solution.