This article is relevant if you are seeking to see a method to accept credit cards from your customers against sales orders to automatically generate linked customer deposits.
Background
Our firm has helped a number of clients leverage NetSuite’s ability to drive websites that allow credit card acceptance. Given NetSuite offers an increasing number of integrated electronic payment gateways, the NetSuite platform exposes a standardized API service to program the business platform which in turn interacts with the merchant payment systems. What NetSuite does not offer, out-of-the-box, is a simple mechanism to send a customer an email with a hyperlink that will direct the customer to a simple website to accept a payment.
Since 2016, we have created a number of programs that we give to our clients, without a license charge, to produce customer driven payment options. See these related articles:
We offered this up via this bundle to our clients as the basis of the solution.
Then a client with greater ambitions sought to generate a customer statement with advanced payment options. See this article: Accept Credit Cards in NetSuite via a Customer Statement
The new mechanism offers more capacities for credit card wallet management with refined processing models. These new capacities were further sought to expose a sales order record which will allow the customer to verify it for reasonableness and then provide a credit card deposit against the order. The idea is that once the credit card payment is supplied, the order would be released for fulfillment. I speak about scalable order management practices in my article, Learn How to Build Scalable NetSuite Sales Order Practices
NetSuite Video (1:59) Demonstration of Credit Card Acceptance Against a Sales Order
You can see a quick (1:59) demonstration of how we can draw a sales order and accept credit cards to automatically create a NetSuite customer deposit. While our previous technologies offered a simplified capability via an opportunity or an estimate, the information provided to the customer did not present detail nor were options for secure wallet management and partial payments.
Activating Customer Driven Credit Card Processing
We think about these solutions differently — for over 10 years acting as a NetSuite Systems Integrator, our goal has always been to listen to requirements to produce solutions leveraging previous patterns and algorithms we have created for other clients. In the case of this solution, not only do we need to present a web page for credit card collection, we address other concerns in the solution:
- Announcement: how do we inform the customer that the amounts are due and that they can pay with a credit card?
- Collection: like this video illustrates, we can drive a branded experience to the customer.
- Receipts: after collecting a payment, it is customary to send the customer an email message representing a payment receipt record with order details.
- Automation: with the customer driving payment processing, subsequent business flows and alerting can be automated.
Thus, a solution is not just the software — it’s more about conceptualizing the experience for customers, order managers, and the accounting department so that customer trust is earned while administrative costs are much lower. Getting the flow dialed in is what it looks like to care for the solution.
If you would like to understand how you can leverage NetSuite to drive credit card processing while automating business flows, let’s have a conversation.