Pivotal Payments says its integration with Pinnacle Cart, Desert Dog Marketing LLC’s e-commerce software designed for merchants to use on their websites, could help its sales agents increase their revenue by attracting more merchants.
Melville, N.Y.-based Pivotal announced the Pinnacle integration Aug. 3. Pinnacle merchants now have the option to use Pivotal for their payment card processing, says Gigi Beyene, director of Pivotal’s ISO/agent program. Pivotal has experience servicing online merchants, and this is another way to reach them, he says.
“This opens the door to more merchants,” Beyene tells ISO&Agent Weekly. ISOs and their agents have a solid base of retail merchants, “but the number of merchants going online is steadily going up,” he says.
Sales agents will benefit from the Pivotal-Pinnacle deal because of the potential to sell processing services to online merchants as opposed to just retail merchants, Beyene says. “[Agents] will get more revenue simply from having the ability to diversify their sales targets and work with Internet merchants,” he says.
Some other ISOs, however, may not pursue online merchants as much as they do retail merchants because of concerns over online-merchant risk, Beyene says.
Pivotal’s underwriting policies, which assess a merchant’s creditworthiness, risk practices and experience with card-not present merchants, enables it to solicit and service such merchants, Beyene says.
“A lot of these ISOs from an underwriting perspective are simply not equipped to bring these merchants on board,” he says. The Pinnacle deal and Pivotal’s experience can help agents sell card-not-present merchant accounts, Beyene says.
