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The Green SheetGreen Sheet

The Green Sheet Online Edition

January 24, 2011 • Issue 11:01:02

New Products

Payments on the fly

Product: wCharge
Company: Transaction Wireless

When Transaction Wireless designed its mobile POS application wCharge, the company had in mind on-the-go businesses that want to be able to accept payments anywhere, anytime. The company believes wCharge fits the bill and has broad appeal among many types of businesses with personnel operating in the field.

One sector drawn to wCharge is "really a lot of the small mobile merchants," said Steve King, Marketing Director for Transaction Wireless. "That can include a church holiday fundraiser, someone who's fixing a leaky pipe, somebody doing traveling fairs, all the way to companies who have individual sales reps out there with their mobile phones doing a service or selling a product via mobile as part of an enterprise."

King said he is seeing strong interest from midsize and enterprise-class businesses managing multiple mobile phones under a single-user account. He said the application allows larger merchants to set up subaccounts where field agents can log in to run transactions, which are automatically sent to the merchant's master account through a secure gateway.

Scalable and easy to manage

"It scales pretty easily for a lot of these companies that have field agents out there, where they can all run their transactions, and they can put in the description field who the agent was, so they have a clear record of who ran the transaction, when it was run and the amount, without having to release sensitive information to their agents," King said.

Depending on where the application is downloaded, wCharge gives most merchants the option to suspend payments. "For example, if they have tradeshows, they have the option to turn on the application, and they can use the application for that month or two months for their busy times," said Sam Nazi, wCharge Product Manager. "If it's their slow time, they can elect to suspend their payments."

While the company charges a monthly fee for its on-demand application, no setup, processing or termination fees are required. Once a merchant becomes a registered user, the application can generally be activated or terminated at any time without penalty, the company said.

Quick deployment, secure features

To begin processing credit cards, merchants follow three easy steps. The first is to sign up on the company's website. Once signup is complete, merchants can either register with their selected gateway or choose PayPal Inc., Authorize.net, or E-Online Data. The final step involves downloading the application to the merchant's existing mobile device.

Transaction Wireless reported that processing payments is equally simple. "It requires merchants to key in the customer's credit card information on the mobile device," Nazi said. "Once the information is keyed in, they submit it to their chosen gateway for processing. The gateway validates the credit card information, and if it's valid, will place the funds into the merchant's gateway account and return back an approved message, along with the authorization number as well."

The application also permits users to send electronic receipts to the purchaser's mobile phone or email address. It can store up to 200 transaction codes for tracking and refund purposes. According to King, all credit card activity is encrypted on a secure sockets layer, and it instantly removes sensitive data from the mobile device to help merchants with both Payment Card Industry and Payment Application Data Security Standard compliance.

For ISOs, wCharge offers two sales programs. "We have an authorized reseller program, which ISOs can basically white label as their own," King said. "We also have an integrated version, where the application can be embedded into larger enterprise-class solutions."

Transaction Wireless
888-458-3988
www.wcharge.com end of article

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