American Express (Amex) is known globally as a trusted credit card company that offers unique benefits and attentive customer service to their customers. Although they have been in the credit card business for 70 years now, they were originally founded as a freight forwarding company and it took them 100 years to roll out their first credit card. Fast forward to 2020, and American Express continues to pioneer the digital commerce space while offering new and exciting options to its customers and merchants.

American Express has long been viewed as the “other” credit card in terms of merchant acceptance. With steeper processing rates than Visa or Mastercard, merchants are often hesitant to accept Amex cards as it can cut into their profits. But, Amex has continued to offer exciting additions to their suite of products that have made it easier and more profitable for merchants to accept Amex cards—the key, however, is understanding these more appealing options for qualified merchants.

The payment and retail landscapes were already undergoing a massive digital transformation before COVID-19 hit. Spurred on by new technologies, customers and business owners have been increasingly seeking out bill pay and checkout experiences that reduce friction; speed up processing and funding times; and eliminate unnecessary wait times or interactions.

Since COVID-19 has made its unfortunate appearance, though, preferences for faster and more digitized payment processes are only growing more urgent. Now, excessive human interactions aren’t just time-consuming, but a potential safety risk. Online shopping and bill pay methods aren’t just convenient; they help maintain social distancing. Mobile order-ahead and contactless payments aren’t just trendy, they provide greater peace of mind. 

Customizing your customer payment flow just got that much easier—the new PaymentSITE Management module is now in beta! Available in the Settings tab of our Cardknox Merchant Portal, PaymentSITE Management allows you to make many changes to the layout and display of your PaymentSITE all on your own—such as :

Clover’s lineup of smart terminals is preferred by many retail and restaurant merchants for their innovative design, extensive array of POS apps (think customer loyalty, inventory management, and food deliveries), and support for a wide range of payment methods. As a Fidelity Merchant, you now have access to Clover’s latest devices that will be sure to upgrade your checkout counter: the Clover Station Pro and Clover Flex LTE Version 2!

With their sleek design and powerful restaurant POS capabilities, Clover’s lineup of smart terminals are the perfect solution for food services businesses. And now, in addition to their powerful tools for managing on-site restaurant orders, Clover is offering its Online Ordering Solutions so that businesses can start accepting food orders online with ease!

At a time when more and more customers are opting for food delivery or takeout, Clover Online Ordering is truly a quick and easy way to appeal to these new preferences. Plus, it’s completely free for all merchants who use the Clover Station countertop device!

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted usual business practices and consumer behaviors, leading to a tremendous increase in chargebacks—and if you’re a business owner, it’s likely you’ve experienced this firsthand. While the travel and hospitality industry has been hit particularly hard due to increased travel cancellations, it’s certainly not the only industry that’s experiencing an increase in chargebacks: other factors such as inventory issues, shipping delays, and a spike of ‘friendly-fraud’ chargebacks filed by cash-strapped customers have affected merchants everywhere.

In this article, we’ll dive into several key factors that are contributing to the chargeback explosion during COVID-19, and share some practical steps that merchants can take to reduce negative outcomes. Plus, we’ll discuss some unique and timely circumstances in which cardholders actually do not have the grounds to dispute transactions.

Your in-store payment terminals are handled by many different people every day, which makes them ideal homes for viruses and bacteria. That’s why regular sanitation of payment terminals and other frequently-touched surfaces in your store is always important, and particularly during flu season. Due to the recent spread of coronavirus, though, it’s become more important than ever for retailers to sanitize their terminals on a daily basis. 

Here’s a quick guide on how you can disinfect your terminals within minutes:

A cashless ATM, otherwise known as point-of-banking technology, is a payment terminal that enables customers to make purchases with a debit card in the same way as they would make an ATM transaction to withdraw cash. The system was originally created as an alternative payment solution to serve high-risk businesses—such as legal medical marijuana dispensaries and certain types of “blacklist” businesses—that typically accept cash as the primary form of payment. Now, a variety of other types of businesses use this method of payment acceptance as well, including lunch trucks and vendors at farmer’s markets, for example.

In part 3 of Fidelity’s Effective Chargeback Management Series, we’ll be focusing on the chargeback reason code “Credit Not Processed”

Whether you call it Faster Payments, Immediate Payments, Instant Payments, or Fast Money, real-time payments technology has gained a solid foothold in the payment processing world.

In Part 1, we gave an overview of what chargebacks are and how merchants can respond to chargebacks with the reason code, “Product or Service Not Received or Merchandise/Service Not Provided.” In the next several installments in our series, we will continue to cover some best practices for even more chargeback types. This week we’ll focus on “Cardholder Claimed Not to Participate” chargebacks.