Monetization for E-Commerce

Monetization for e-commerce platforms involves incorporating a billing and charging engine in the e-commerce platform. The e-commerce platform can rely on the billing engine to track and manage the one time payments, the order management and the recurring subscriptions. Monetization platforms also facilitate the payment collection and the payment reconciliation functions in the background.

Having a platform which is secure and PCI DSS compliant is important considering the processing of online payments from the e-commerce platform. EarnBill allows an e-commerce monetization platform to focus on its own application requirements and provides a good infrastructural support for billing, rating, charging, invoicing and payment processing.

This allows e-commerce platforms to achieve segregation of concerns and not get entangled into the world of billing and payments so much, instead simply rely on EarnBill. E-commerce platforms can focus on what they are good at, leaving billing and payments to an expert like EarnBill.

EarnBill provides a secured option to process payments from an e-commerce platform. EarnBill’s various software modules, services and infrastructure conform to strict security checks that are validated by ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II audits. The diagram below shows how EarnBill can be integrated into an e-commerce platform and can be relied upon in real time transaction processing for payments.

An e-commerce platform typically has an application with a checkout system as a software module. There can be various front end options such as a mobile app or public web sites that connect to the e-commerce platform’s checkout module. These web pages or mobile apps drive traffic to the e-commerce platform for online purchases or tracking of orders etc.

Each online purchase transaction can entail a checkout workflow in which the products or goods are added to a checkout page and an online order is placed to the platform. Upon confirming such an order with one or more line items in it, a real time payment processing transaction is initiated from the e-commerce platform.

EarnBill, integrated within the e-commerce platform, provides a convenient web API layer using the REST protocol. It provides a convenient transaction processing API that carries out payment processing in real time. There are various payment processing options with EarnBill. EarnBill supports more than a dozen different payment gateways OOTB. It is also possible to add a new custom plugin for the payment gateway of your choice.

EarnBill can support payments using credit cards, bank accounts, ACH, mobile wallets, Stripe bank transfers and more. There are multitude of payment methods available with EarnBill that allows you to choose the payment gateway and payment methods of your choice, the ones that will suit your requirement and business.

The payments can be processed with payment instruments that are already tokenized (authorised for recurring payments by the user) or using one time payment instruments (that are not authorised for recurring payments). EarnBill supports tokenization workflows that help to store payment instruments securely into the system, with full PCI DSS compliance.

Payment Reconciliation can simply be defined as matching and ticking off of payments received from customers against their respective invoices. EarnBill, as a billing and charging system, provides this reconciliation in an automated manner and no explicit handling is required for this reconciliation.

The below diagram shows another form of payment reconciliation which is fast becoming important for e-commerce platforms that process thousands of payments on a daily basis.

In this payment reconciliation, there are 2 steps involved:

1. Reconciling payments between the payment processing software such as EarnBill and the Payment Gateway.
2. The second aspect of this reconciliation is matching the amount received in the merchant bank account and reconciling that with a sum total of all the transactions.

The payment gateways do provide reports for all transactions processed in a day, but such a report or a recon file (as shown in the diagram) needs to be reconciled with all the transactions in the payment processing software. This ensures that all transactions initiated from the e-commerce platform indeed reached the payment gateway and were processed successfully. EarnBill provides a payment reconciliation batch job that can match and reconcile thousands of payments on a daily basis.

If there are any payments that are not found on the payment gateway but processed by the e-commerce platform, then can be manually reviewed and adjustments made or a customer is reported of a problem. Vice-a-versa, if there are payments processed by the gateway and not by the platform (due to a platform availability error for example), then such payments can be posted manually and customer’s request serviced.

EarnBill provides convenient UI options and reports to reconcile the payments in this way. This makes the job of your accounts and finance department very easy. Add to this convenient revenue reporting by EarnBill, makes it even more easier to manage your revenue reporting and accounting for the finance department.

EarnBill also makes it easy to reconcile deposits received from the payment gateway into the merchant account with the sum total of the transactions that have been already reconciled against the payment gateway. EarnBill ensures that you have an eye over transactions and reconciling your payments on a daily basis. Essentially the EarnBill e-commerce billing platform is ensuring that there is no revenue leakage for you due to technical errors in any of the systems involved in this crucial transaction processing.

In summary, EarnBill provides real time transaction processing options with a number of popular payment gateways and a flexible module for payment reconciliation which can help your company reduce or stop revenue leakage due to errors.

EarnBill’s monetization for e-commerce platforms has been implemented into marketplace platforms as well as revenue collection sites by government agencies.