Merchants who provide "Level 3" data to their credit card processors can save up to 50-100 basis points on credit card interchange fees. That is nearly halving your payment processing costs.

Most merchants are unaware of that this was even possible!

What is Level 3 data?

In addition to provided standard merchant name, purchase amount, date, and billing zip code, the merchant will also share SKUs, unit prices, quantities, shipping fees, and line item totals. 

What exactly are the benefits?

The 5 key benefits are:

1. Lowering your payment processing fees by 50-100 basis points
2. Faster settlements
3. Greater sales
4. Speed up accounting reconciliation with SKU level data
5. Reduce chargebacks, fraud, and errors

If you have set up for Level 3 data processing, your payment processor will send credit card machine data to the card networks for you, which will reduce the likelihood of chargebacks and increase your ability to dispute fraudulent transactions.

How much do I really save?

Merchants pay 2.9% fees for default Level 1 payment methods.

Upgrade your system to Level 3, and you only pay 1.9%. Save 100 basis points. Cut your costs by 34%.

The 3 Levels of Payments Data Processing

Level 1 Data:

This is the lowest level of data available and is essentially just the card number and a few pieces of information about the transaction. This is what most payment processors charge for and it’s the most basic level of payment processing.

Level 2 Data:

This is the first step up above Level 1 data and includes a little more information about the transaction such as sales tax amount, invoice number, and order number. Level 2 data also provides your payment processor with a lot of information about the products and services you sell which they can use to help with managing fraud.

Level 3 Data:

This is the highest level of data available and this includes a lot more information about your products and services such as item description, product codes, unit price, wholesale price etc… You’ll also find that with Level 3 data, some of the information will be encoded and encrypted so that only your payment processor can decode it. Keep in mind that not all payment processors provide the same level of service when it comes to providing Level 3 data to their merchants. And because Level 3 data is so vital to anyone who accepts credit and debit cards there can be a lot of variation in pricing for merchants in this space.

Who does Level 3 data impact most strongly?

1. Merchants
2. Accounts Payable and finance departments and organizations
3. Bill payments companies
4. Payments processors
5. Expense management businesses

But there are still fees with credit cards, why should I accept them?

In a world shaken by COVID, payer adoption of digital, contactless, eCommerce, and other innovative payment methods have accelerated by years. Buyers prefer to pay invoices with credit cards because they get rewards, cash-back, and convenience. Merchants get paid faster when accepting credit cards, instead of waiting weeks for check, ACH, EFT, and wires. Merchants miss out on significant business if they fall behind in payments innovations.

What are the specific data fields?

Level 1 (Standard)

• Merchant name
• Purchase amount
• Billing zip

Level 2

All Level 1 fields, plus:

• Sales tax
• Customer code
• Invoice number
• Order number
• Tax indicator

Level 3

All Level 1 and Level 2 fields, plus:

• Product code
• SKU description
• Quantity
• Shipping amount
• Discount
• Line item amounts

References:

1. Wikipedia Card Transaction Data 

It's not the most intuitive thing that satisfied vendors can lead to satisfied customers. Implementing a modern Vendor Portal or Supplier Relationship Management system is key to streamlining your supply chain and minimizing errors, costs, inventory, and shrinkage.

1. Free up your time from managing your vendors so that you can focus on getting more customers
   
   
2. Vendors may ship the incorrect quantities, products, or packages to you. Logistics companies spend a large fraction of their operations teams doing manual exception handling and error resolution. Automate the reconciliation process to ensure that every item, package, order, shipment, and detail is tracked in real-time. 
   
   
3. Vendors, shippers, customers, and logistics teams get real-time visibility, preventing wasted time asking "Where's my package?", "Where's my check?". All of these answers are captured and updated in real-time in the portal.
   
   
4. Eliminate blind arrivals. Vendors may forget to send Advance Shipping Notices (ASNs) to their warehouses, distributors, or fulfillment centers. Blind arrivals are especially prevalent with shipments that arrive in small parcels and Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) freight. Blind arrivals are received shipments that are unexpected, lacking advance notice. These packages can cause confusion in accounting. It gets even more complex if the senders have multiple identities, entities, names, aliases, addresses, and order numbers. 
   
   
5. Centralize all of your logistics, accounting, and inventory data into one place. Having hundreds of spreadsheets fly around in inboxes every month can lead to costly errors, discrepancies, and mistakes, not to mention time lost. 
   
   
6. Track and trace all edits, movements, and approvals. 
   
   
7. Amend mistakes easily. Let's face it, logistics is still a very human business. SKUs may be entered wrong, invoices or packing lists may contain errors, totals or prices may not always add up. SKUs may be discovered to be on backorder or delayed. Logistics teams and vendors can make updates in real-time, with logic built in where only before certain points can certain data be amended. 
   
   
8. Get an aerial view of your operations, with an analytics dashboard that shows totals, statuses, and breakdowns of accounts in any way you'd like to slice the data. 
   
   
9. For businesses that are outgrowing Excel, Quickbooks, and yet do not find SAP or Oracle to have a 'delightful' experience, a Vendor Portal is the easiest way to organize your experience with your vendors, operations teams, and customers. 
   
   
10. Make vendors, distributors, and customers enjoy and delight the experience in working with you. No more chaotic and disorganized workflows over email, Whatsapp, phone, and texting. Modernize the way you work with vendors and customers. 

A modern approach to vendor and customer management

Photon Commerce's Vendor Portal streamlines ordering, shipments, receiving, inventory, and payments in a single page. Optimized for eCommerce distributors, wholesalers, Buyers Clubs, fulfillment centers, warehousing, 3PL, and 4PL businesses, the vendor portal reduces friction, errors, exceptions, time, and discrepancies between vendors and customers. Over 100 distribution and logistics use Photon Commerce every day, accessing over 100,000 vendors. Photon manages millions of dollars of SKUs and shipments a day.

The packing slip is a key shipping document that just might get the least love.

What is a packing slip?

It is that piece of paper awkwardly shoved behind the shipping label in that pouch, or is sitting between you and your items, separating you from continuing your unboxing therapy.

What do I do with this awkward piece of paper? Most people might send it straight into the garbage with a half-broken down box...

Packing slips tell you what is supposed to be in your package, so that you can account for what you order and receive.

Why is it important for businesses to properly process packing slips?

Packing slips are essentially receipts, confirming that you've received the contents of that package. Packing slips contain critical information about your orders, vendors, SKUs, products, descriptions, units of measure, and quantities. 

What is involved in receiving and accounting in eCommerce?

A single order could come in over many shipments, packages, and packing slips. It's important to account for your received packages and items, so you don't discover missing items before it's too late. Buyers should only pay for items that they receive, not items that they order.

In eCommerce, 15% of packages are lost, damaged, delivered to the wrong address, stolen by "porch pirates", or contain the wrong items, as reported by the New York Times.

​Nearly 20% of eCommerce products are returned. That's a lot of room of errors and exceptions to happen between shipment and receiving.

In an increasingly digital world, the packing slip is still obviously on paper. 

What's a solution to organize and process packing slips, to go from paper to digital? 

Photon Commerce introduces a unique solution missing in the industry. It digitizes, organizes, and reconciles all of your packing slips. It reads the packing lists, whether they are a paper scan or a PDF, extracts all of the data, and imports them all into your inventory and accounting software. It even automatically matches packing slips to invoices, order confirmations, and POs down to line items, SKUs, and quantities. 

Photon Commerce digitizes tens of thousands of packing slips a day across millions of items for modern eCommerce and logistics businesses large and small. No more manual data entry, reconciliation over endless spreadsheets, or arguing with your suppliers on where your missing items are. With more accurate inventory, prevent stock-outs, wrong orders, and angry customers.

Reach out at packingslips@photoncommerce.com to see how you can organize all of your orders, SKUs, receiving, invoicing, inventory, and accounting. 

NVIDIA's GTC 2020 conference will also host an interaction session with Photon Commerce. The group will be discussing the latest trends in NLP, computer vision, GPU-accelerated machine learning training, and document understanding. 

Check out the session

Moore's Law...is officially dead. The digital age has now transitioned to "Huang's Law", thanks to NVIDIA. The NVIDIA GTC conference is happening this week. Photon is speaking during a session about how cutting edge AI can understand documents.

How to understand documents using AI: NVIDIA GTC 2020 Photon Commerce

Check out why NVIDIA's historic $40B acquisition of ARM.

More's Law is dead. Long live...Huang's Law.

Fujitsu and Photon Commerce have partnered together to build a bridge between the paper and digital worlds, made possible with document machine intelligence. 

Fujitsu is the global market leader in document scanning for businesses. Fujitsu commands 44% and 71% market share in North America and Japan, and delivers industry leading scan quality.

Businesses now can further accelerate document scanning and digital transformation with intelligent capture technology, enabling them to manage all of their documents with even greater efficiency and accuracy. 

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Photon Commerce CEO Michael Young

NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference GTC accepted Photon Commerce to present. The conference takes place October 5-9, 2020 online.

Photon Commerce will be giving a talk about how to achieve reading comprehension of business documents, invoices, and receipts through GPUs, deep learning, and natural language processing. 

Photon Commerce is a partner of the world's deep learning hardware leader, NVIDIA, leveraging the NVIDIA Inception Program. 

Stay tuned for details on the talk. 

Register for NVIDIA GTC at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc/

​

The Nasdaq HQ building in Times Square celebrated Photon Commerce and its other startups' accomplishments. 

​The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center's Milestone Makers program chose Photon Commerce as an innovation leader, among startups from around the world. In every cohort, it supports about a dozen entrepreneurial thought leaders from around the world. 

Learn more at https://thecenter.nasdaq.org/milestone-makers/

​

$3 trillion. That's how much money is overdue from invoices right now in the US. Vendors feel the pain every day this cashflow problem lingers.

While the average payments terms are 30 days, businesses take 33 days to pay their invoices. That means the average payment duration is 63 days in the US! 50% of invoices are paid past due. And that was before COVID. The data is still coming in, and the full effects are still permeating into industries at various rates.

​Over 90% of companies reported late payments by their B2B customers. 

Especially when AP teams are working from home and all sectors are being slammed from COVID, these staggering problems are an urgent call for innovation in invoicing. 

References: Atradius