The latest release of Cobalt’s products now include the ability to create, manage and apply payment profiles as a payment type for Portal and CRM processes. The ability to pay with a credit card profile that is stored by the payment provider saves time during the checkout process and gives users a way to pay more securely without the need to reenter their payment card information every time. The feature is configurable to allow a specified number of saved profiles and includes the ability to update existing profiles and create profiles as part of the checkout process. For customers that do not wish to allow users to create payment profiles the feature can be completely disabled from the settings entity in CRM.
The added security of allowing users to create payment profiles comes from the fact that credit card information is stored with the payment provider. The payment providers securely store the payment card information and provide Cobalt with a profile identifier that can be used to perform subsequent authorized charges. By reducing the number of times a user has to enter their credit card information into a website there is less chance that the information can be seen by prying eyes and there is less of a barrier to completion of a sale. All of this is good for business and good for busy users who need to get in and get done.
Most major payment service providers support payment profile creation in one way or another. However, they often have unique ways of handling it through their programming interfaces. Cobalt handles that disparity by leaving the details of the implementation to the services that can be configured in the settings along with the toggling on and off of the feature itself. The interfaces to those services are standard and therefore the experience to the end user is the same no matter what payment provider is a customer chooses to use. Cobalt’s products support a wide variety of payment providers out of the box including Authorize.NET, Paypal Payment Gateway, FirstData and Chase Orbital Payment Gateway. We have also implemented custom payment services for international customers and proprietary payment providers. The service oriented nature of the payment provider configuration means new payment gateways can be created and plugged into Cobalt’s products in very little time.