IP Commerce is a Denver based company that, for the last four years or so, has focussed on providing tools for various parties to provide payments and the services that go around that. Payment processing is obviously a very sensitive area, the costs to those who get it wrong are significant – both in terms of reputation and financially. Apart from the all important compliance issues however, a neutral processing party can add such novel twists to payments as allowing for the use of multiple payment services, reducing implementation time and capturing meta-data for analytics.
In a move that is reminiscent of the theme de-jour PaaS, however, IP Connect also enables a whole bunch of things that only a connected model can. It sees itself as being the facilitator of all things related to payments and as such provides solutions for;
IP Commerce has some metrics around implementation time for their payment services platform versus traditional products. While these sorts of statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt, they are claiming a reduction in go live from 13 months down to 6 weeks and a corresponding reduction in breakeven point.
In response to my scepticism about “lies, damn lies and statistics” IP Commerce responded saying that
the numbers that we reference above represent the following…direct integration to processor, sitting in the integration queue, development, compliance obligations, testing, certification, and go-live. Depending on the software company, they may experience a much quicker integration with a processor…or they simply won’t get any attention in the queue at all (particularly an issue for the SMB focused solutions). Usually, when we speak with Software Companies, we reference a 3.5x improvement in time and cost to bringing a solution to market. We achieve these improvements by collapsing the disparate streams of integration, compliance, testing, certification, and market readiness into a unified lifecycle workflow (diagram below)
as well as providing integration tools that, inherently, simplify the process. The hard statistic:
The ~6 week time in the presentation is the average from downloading the appropriate toolkit to completing certification in the IP Commerce network today.
Tyler Hannan, platform evangelist for IP Commerce, gave me a couple of examples of IP Commerce being leveraged to good effect. The first is provision for a hosted checkout provider that removes some of the difficulties with incumbent providers (look-and-style of payment page, secure hosting, etc) while the second is an accounting integration with QuickBooks to allow online payment of invoices created on a desktop application.
The ReceivePay Secure Invoicing workflow around payment enablement of periodic invoices looks like this demo;
Commerce Lab
IP Commerce has Commerce Lab, a place that allows software companies to create and deliver their own payment applications – they can pick and chose payment methods (cards, checks etc etc) and leverage the IP Commerce architecture to build it all together
Commerce Marketplace
Lastly the Commerce Marketplace provides, in a particularly Force.com way, the ability to self-publish applications onto an online solution catalog. From their potential customers can search and acquire applications, all the while leveraging the IP Commerce architecture for implementation and delivery.
Pricing
For Software Companies, the IP Commerce integration tools are freely available. Other hosted services, such as tokenization, are provided as a SaaS offering with an associated usage fee.
