Epicor Credit Card Processing

Card issuers provide credit and debit cards to customers. For instance, a bank may issue a MasterCard® credit card. These institutions also pay the merchant bank (also termed the acquiring bank) on behalf of consumers who use their card for purchases.

Card networks such as MasterCard, Visa®, Discover®, and American Express® facilitate transactions between the Card Issuer, Merchants, Processors, and Banks. These companies provide the electronic networks that enable all parties to process transactions and communicate with each other.

A payment processor is a company that handles  transactions so that your customers can buy your products. The payment processor checks for security measures such as verifying that the customer’s card data is correct. Payment processors are technology platforms that coordinate with card networks, card issuers, and banks to enable merchants to process debit and credit card as well as prepaid payments. Epicor Payment Exchange was developed and is owned by Epicor and is a certified payment processor.

This account is used to process the credit and debit card payments taken from your customers. The daily sales transactions are deposited as a batch total at the bank account of your choice. Merchant accounts are essential to businesses, especially those that accept credit cards online. Without a merchant account, you cannot accept money from a customer’s credit or debit card.

The payment gateway connects the payment processor and the merchant account to the card network companies such as Visa or American Express. In essence, it’s connecting your customer’s financial account to your merchant account. Without a payment gateway, you would be missing a major part of completing a financial transaction. The Epicor Payment Gateway was developed by Epicor and includes the Payment Manager, a web-based view of transactions processed. The Epicor Payment Gateway performs encryption and tokenization of cardholder data.

The software application that sits between the ERP system and a Payment Gateway. The Epicor Payment Application (EPA) was developed by Epicor and interacts between the on-premises or cloud deployed ERP systems of Epicor and the Payment Gateway.

When you submit a credit card transaction, the ERP sends the transaction information to the EPA. EPA validates the transaction and generates a token to be stored in the ERP, then it connects to the Epicor Payment Gateway. The Epicor Payment Gateway connects to the payment processor specified, either Epicor Payment Exchange or a third-party processor. Then the processor connects to the card associations, and the card issuer authorizes the transaction and posts to the cardholder. The merchant is funded a few days later by the payment processor.

Epicor is a Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliant Service Provider (gateway, tokenization, and encryption services).

The ERP systems delivered by Epicor are not in the PCI scope, and the cardholder data is never stored directly in these systems. When the ERP user enters the credit card and the expiration date, this data is stored securely in the cloud. The ERP systems only store a token that represents the card number and type. The Epicor Payment Gateway allows a reduced Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) scope for customers and the ERP cloud infrastructure.

Merchants can decide how much data they allow on a specific transaction to the payment processors. Some card issuers offer reduction on the interchange fees, if more data are provided on the transaction. Examples are zip code, invoice number, tax amount or line-item details.