E-Commerce services provider Digital River is launching a mobile payment acceptance product called Beanstream Mobile.
"We are seeing an interaction between the online and offline world in the small to medium business segment, and we saw a gap where most of the mobile payments technology was geared toward the consumer," says Souheil Badran, senior vice president and general manager of Digital River World Payments.
Beanstream Mobile works with an encrypted card reader and an iOS or Android mobile app. Digital River is including its application programming interface (API) toolkit to enable users to manage payments data and analytics. The API is also available to developers to integrate mobile payments into their applications.
"If you are building your own mobile app, we can say 'here is a connection to Digital River,'" says Ryan Stewart, director of product management for Digital River World Payments.
Merchants swipe or key in credit or debit card data to accept transactions, and can supply receipts with geolocation data via a printed copy, email or text messages. The system also consolidates sales and workflows, which is designed to make it easier to manage mobile payments and inventory.
Digital River is offering Beanstream to merchants and financial institutions on a white-label basis, and it is allowing merchants to tailor customer information fields to match their business objectives. It has a one-step signature and gratuities screen and it can apply up to two automatic sales taxes. The product is being targeted at the traditional mobile point of sale market, including small businesses, businesses that aren't tied to a brick-and-mortar location, charities, service organizations, traveling salespeople and drivers
Digital River is facing a crowded market of mobile point of sale providers, including
Digital River hopes the new product appeals to its existing base of clients that use the company's other services, such as site development and hosting, order management, global payments, cloud-based billing, fraud management, export controls, tax management, physical and digital product fulfillment, multi-lingual customer service, reporting and marketing.
"We have a lot of companies that are using us as an online gateway for electronic commerce," Badran says.
The company is also using navigation and user experience as a luretouting its currency flexibility, API and smaller measures such as reminders on how to use the headset jack.
"You have to have the volume cranked up on the device to use it. That may be a small thing, but it can help execute the payment properly on the first swipe," Stewart says. "We ran a lot of focus groups, and a lot of people said they wanted simplicity."
Digital River also allows clients to use paper receipts.
"A lot of mobile point of sale users will go with email or text receipts, but there are some will want to print a receipt," Stewart says. Digital River's software works with Apple's Airprint printing program, an option also available from other mobile point of sale providers such as Square.
Digital Rivers supports mobile payments in 140 currencies, Stewart says. "You can switch between currencies on the fly to take payments in international markets," he says.
