A Complete Guide to Payment Solutions for E-Commerce Businesses

Whether you're a B2B or B2C e-commerce business, you need payment solutions that are reliable, flexible, easy to integrate with, and empowering to your team. Below are some key Finix features that will help you optimize your payments, achieve higher conversion rates, and make managing payments more efficient and scalable.

Unlike most payment providers that rely on third-party processors, Finix is a full-stack acquirer processor. As a processor, we remove several layers from the acquiring side of the payment stack.

This means increased profitability for your business as we can save you up to 40% on processing costs compared to traditional models when using agents and independent sales organizations (ISOs).

Many payments companies on the market either act as a reseller or only provide the payment gateway technology. Because they rely on third-party technology vendors and processors, this exposes your business to an increased risk of outages and higher payment processing costs.

We can also have you up and running faster, give you more control over your payment experience, and provide more streamlined reporting (more on this later).

Finix’s API is highly responsive, which helps reduce checkout abandonment due to false payment declines, sluggish payment performance, and timeouts, while simultaneously increasing authorization rates.

Preventing false payment declines and errors during the payment process can significantly affect your customer experiences and your bottom line. For example, as a whole, retailers lost out on $16 billion in sales from transactions that were falsely flagged as fraudulent in 2022.

In addition to our leading API response times, we maintain an industry-leading 99.999% uptime while making billions of API calls a year. We also have multiple failsafes in place to ensure you can continue processing payments even if there’s an outage in your region.

This is important as just one hour of network downtime can cost $300,000 or more—that’s $5,600 a minute. With Finix, you can be confident that your payment processing is in good, capable hands.

Our dashboard was designed to be intuitive for back-office users. We’ve designed our menus so that you can quickly find the information you need. Our no-code dashboard tools save time as your payment operations teams can perform tasks in just a few clicks, including adding your own branding to the dashboard.

Finix provides customizable, prebuilt checkout pages specifically designed for individual businesses and e-commerce platforms. These pages help get you to market faster and can save thousands in developer resources. They can also help improve conversions as they’re fully optimized and hook effortlessly into the Finix API.

Our virtual terminal is a no-code solution with zero integration time—you can be up and running in as fast as one day. This feature is crucial for individual businesses and e-commerce platforms as it lets you key in transactions manually or process mail-in orders and one-time payments over the phone. It also allows you to issue refunds. All information entered into your virtual terminal is saved and tokenized in a customer profile, and the necessary fields are included to support Level 2 and Level 3 processing to help you save on interchange fees.

Virtual terminals can be used alongside an integrated checkout flow or used as your primary checkout experience.

You can also customize the checkout experience by offering automated billing and subscriptions to help collect more revenue based on your unique business needs.

Send invoices for bill payment, as an invoice that can be paid at a later date, or as a receipt. Our invoicing feature also lets you add as many line items as you need and is Level 2 and Level 3 processing compliant. You can configure functionality for full or partial payments and customers have the ability to pay on a variety of devices, such as their computer or phone.

Easily generate payment links and send them via email or text. You can also integrate a link directly on your website. Our payment links can be configured without code and are perfect for products, services, or donations.

You don’t need developers to get started with Finix. However, for customers who want higher levels of customization, we offer a powerful payments API with a single point of integration. We use a consistent API data structure, which makes integration and building new features a breeze.

• Only one integration for online and in-person payments

• Switch from sandbox to production in just a few clicks - never lose work

• Easy no-code tools for creating and updating webhooks and webhook event logs

• API logs and more

We provide a transparent look into your payments, including the ability to access transaction-level details, authorization rates, trends, and more through reports and interactive charts and graphs. This can help you improve your payments experience, optimize for higher conversion rates, and let you more easily identify any payment issues before they spiral out of control.

Finix provides automated and on-demand, downloadable reports. Access the data you need with predefined date presets or custom date ranges.

You'll have access to the following data and much more:

• Total transaction volume, number of transactions, and percentage change from the previous period

• Authorization rate, number of authorizations, and percentage change from previous period

• Average transaction amount

• Transaction volume trends

• Authorization trends

• Transaction amount trends

• Insights into the previous month, including total residual amount, average interchange and dues and assessments, and amount of card payments

• Year-to-date insights, including disputes, ACH returns, and chargeback rates

With the increased demand for e-commerce and digital payments has also come increased fraud. Recent findings show that payment fraud has tripled worldwide since 2011, hitting $32.39 billion in 2020. It’s imperative that customers feel safe when using your website to make purchases.

Unlike most payment providers, fraud detection is baked into our product at no extra cost. Our real-time fraud detection APIs use fraud rules, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to continuously monitor consumer behavior and purchases.

The Finix API automatically captures and monitors the data from customer-facing websites in real time, which vastly minimizes your risk chargeback risk, while preventing false payment declines.

Finix lets you view, track, and manage disputes and chargebacks right in your dashboard. Along with access to daily and monthly data disputes data, you’re also able to upload evidence and have a team of payment experts behind you to help you defend—and win—chargebacks.

Keep your payments data secure by assigning user roles and permissions. This way, you can control who can access what information and features in the Finix dashboard.

Our tag feature helps you gain more data per transaction and lets you search for specific transactions by associated tag/keyword. This is helpful for finding one transaction out of a large volume of transactions and can even help you monitor sales and marketing campaigns by attributing tags to certain transactions.

We make in-person payments easy. We only require a single integration to accept payments online and in person, which reduces development time by 50% or more. We also provide hardware and software support and give a variety of terminal options to choose from. You also get pre-loaded payment terminals for sandbox testing and pre-certified, ready-to-use terminals shipped straight to you.

At Finix, we’re invested in your success. This means when you partner with us, you’re supported by a dedicated team of payment experts. Here’s a look at what makes us unique:

Predictable pricing designed to save you money

True to our dedication to transparency for all things related to your payment operations, we also put our rates and pricing online. We have two pricing tiers: starter and custom.

Starter packages start at $250 per month for businesses processing up to $1 million; custom packages are for businesses processing over $1 million annually and are priced by your unique processing volume. Both tiers have 0% markup on interchange and per transaction rates that are friendly to your bottom line.

Our innovative pricing model is transparent and offers you unlimited processing for one fixed subscription price—no hidden fees or markup on interchange.

Additionally, as a full-stack acquirer processor, we pass along our economic advantage to our customers. Your business can realize 30-40% savings on card processing.

Level 2 and Level 3 processing

We want to give you every opportunity to maximize your payments revenue. That’s why we support Level 2 and Level 3 processing (L2/L3),24 which lets you take advantage of lower interchange on qualified B2B and government transactions made with supported card brands.

For comparison, Stripe charges the standard 2.9% + $0.30 and doesn’t support Level 2 or Level 3 processing to lower interchange for commercial card transactions. They also only offer interchange pricing to select customers.

Better customer support

At Finix, we believe good customer service is a right, not a paid privilege. With providers like Stripe, if you want premium support and quick response times, you’re going to have to pay for it. Our support team provides first-class customer service to all our customers. We’re here to help you any time during regular business hours and we provide 24/7 emergency support.

There are many working parts when it comes to increasing conversion rates and your payments partner will play a major role in your success. With Finix, you have a team of payment experts who are dedicated to payment optimization. We make payments easier and more efficient so that you can create the best possible experiences for your customers.

Finix supports the payment features you need to optimize payments, including multiple payment methods such as credit and debit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, as well as features like payment links, subscriptions and recurring payments, hosted checkout pages, and more. Not only that, but we’re continuously adding new features to our payments suite that ensure e-commerce and retail businesses have everything they need to be successful.