Shoppers Stop Ltd : Credit Card Processing Application

A solution for automatic selection of the bank acquirer for credit card processing

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

More than half of Shoppers Stop sales are through credit and debit cards. Each transaction requires a fee (sometimes called discounting fee) to be paid to the transaction acquiring bank which is a percentage of the sale amount. To make sure that the bank with the lowest processing charge at that point in time gets the bulk of the transactions and to cater to customers' preferences on their choice of acquirer, retailers traditionally deploy multiple EDC machines supplied by the banks at their Point of Sale. This increases the clutter at these critical touch points. Further the Customer Care Associates (CCAs) have to be briefed regularly regarding EDCs to be used. Each EDC transaction is done over traditional PSTN lines which are designed for carrying voice rather than data. This results in transactions taking longer times which in turn snow ball into longer check out queues and at peak time lost sales on account of frustrated customers abandoning their shopping baskets. The end result is loss of several million rupees in sales and dissatisfied customers. To battle this problems Shoppers Stop and hence Pine Labs came up with an application called Plutus which was initially only working with ICICI. Gradually it was also upgraded to work with Citibank making it an ideal product for Shoppers Stop.

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