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First Data Corp. is taking its Clover brand, known until now as a mobile point-of-sale service, to the Web with a launch May 3 of the Clover Online Store.
Announced Wednesday at Transact16, the Electronic Transactions Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas, the service enables merchants to set up an e-commerce site using templates that already include shopping-cart software. Payment acceptance can begin as soon as the site launches, First Data says, adding that 28% of all global online transactions pass through its network.
Merchants using the Clover mPOS service and a Clover-based e-commerce site will be able to view transaction data from both in one account view. The service will be free through Dec. 31, but merchants will pay $29.95 per month not including their processing fees after that. The service is targeted at small-to-mid-size businesses.
Though merchants wanting to use the service at its launch next month will need to be Clover mPOS customers, too, that won’t be the case later on, Dan Charron, First Data executive vice president of global business solutions, tells Digital Transactions News. Ideally, though, a merchant using both will benefit the most, he says.
Charron says the advent of the Clover Online Store also reaffirms First Data’s view of Clover as an open platform with application programming interfaces that can be used to power a variety of payment channels.
Web sites made using Clover Online Store also include data-protection technology, automatic search engine optimization, mobile-friendly design, automatic updates, and social media integration, among other features.
First Data says it serves more than 6 million merchant locations, but would not say how many are small or mid-size businesses.
In other payments news, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said its Samsung Pay mobile payments service now has partnerships with most of the major point-of-sale terminal makers, including VeriFone Systems Inc., Ingenico Group, First Data, Pax Technology, Equinox Payments, ID TECH, MagTek, USA ePay, and OTI Global in a bid to ensure its service works with their devices.
Samsung Pay uses near-field communication (NFC). Unlike Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay and Google Inc.’s Android Pay, Samsung Pay also uses magnetic secure transmission, a technology that emulates a magnetic-stripe transaction with radio waves. Samsung says the effort will help systematically test and validate different POS systems in the field to ensure compatibility.
Samsung Pay’s MST transaction type works at most, but not all, POS terminals.
