Electronic payment service cuts lost revenues, saves time

Drug Store News, Sept 25, 2000

SPOKANE, Wash. -- MEISolutions.com, a business-to-business Internet and retail solutions provider, is introducing a new Electronic Payment System software package created to fit the needs of retailers who are clients of Vital Processing Services, a leading technology-based, commerce-enabling services company.

According to John Barnes, vice president of marketing for MEISolutions.com, preliminary returns from a company survey now under way show that about 50 percent of merchants are dissatisfied with their current electronic payment system.

Some merchants, he said, currently experience transaction processing downtimes of 2 percent to percent per month.

Lost transactions, of course, result in lost revenues, and according to MEISolutions.com research, one general merchandise store currently is losing about $320,000 in annual revenues as a result of problems with its current payment system.

The new software, which was created to eliminate numerous payment system problems, is the focus of a three-year partnership agreement between MEISolutions.com and Tempe, Ariz.-based Vital Processing Solutions. The two companies are now in the process of introducing the first application based on that partnership: Vital EPS, powered by MEISolutions.com.

At press time, the software, which can be customized to meet nearly any retailer's needs, was about to be installed in a California-based food chain.

According to Barnes, the software can be integrated easily with a wide variety of in-store point-of-sale systems. It offers support for EPS, as well as payment processing through Vital.

As the largest independent third party merchant processor, Vital, which handled over 5 billion purchasing transactions in 1999 and serviced more than 1 million merchants, has the exclusive rights to offer its clients a combination of financial services processing and support with the MEI EPS product.

Through the MET/Vital partnership, the new Vital EPS software can provide a complete managed payment solution to retailers that can be customized to fit the needs of any Vital customer.

"Together, we have a full service payment processing solution that enables us to offer retailers a choice for their POS software, online debit and EBT processing business," said Jon Palmer, chief executive and president of Vital Processing Services.

Palmer added that the new software solution can result "in tremendous cost savings and improved service.

Scott Schmidtman, president of MEISolutions.com, called the partnership "a true win-win relationship."

Barnes noted that based on the elimination of downtime and the ability to minimize slow transaction approvals, retailers who install the software could achieve a return on their investment in about one to two months if their operating systems and POS hardware are current and they are using high speed network connections.