There are over 80 million consumers in the U.S. that prefer to transact with cash. Rather than limiting these customers from shopping online, you can now meet their needs by offering Green Dot MoneyPak as a form of payment. Enabled by Cardinal Centinel, MoneyPak allows users to 'digitize' their cash at thousands of retailers nationwide, and then spend it at your online store.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Customer visits one of the 40,000+ Green Dot locations nationwide (including Walgreen's, RiteAid, Radio Shack and CVS).

Step 2: Customer gives cash to the checkout clerk to load onto the MoneyPak- anywhere from $20 - $500.

Step 3: Customer visits your online store and enters their MoneyPak PIN (located on the back of the MoneyPak card) at checkout.

Step 4: Guaranteed funds are transferred to you, the merchant. No interchange fee is charged.

By accepting MoneyPak on your site you're opening your business to 30% of the national population that is cash paying, including teens, the financially underserved community, and the millions of consumers that fear identity theft and are therefore hesitant to provide credit card information over the Internet.

You may be wondering who really uses MoneyPak? Is it a viable solution? Has it penetrated a user base? Each year, Green Dot generates $1.5 Billion in transactions and deposits per year from roughly 10 million MoneyPaks. By accepting it on your site, you are clearly satisfying a significant customer demographic.

Whether you're an existing Centinel Customer or thinking of enabling MoneyPak as your first payment option through Centinel, the integration will be seamless. Cardinal has dedicated significant resources to make merchant deployment of MoneyPak fast, easy and simple.

To learn more about Green Dot MoneyPak or Cardinal Centinel, contact CardinalCommerce Merchant Services today at 877-352-8444 or email Salesupport@CardinalCommerce.com.

April's edition of "The Adverse Effects of Fraud Screening: Are you Forfeiting Customers" uncovered the imperfections of fraud screening and detection tools and asked readers to question their current order acceptance process. This month we'll take a deeper look into those orders that failed automated order acceptance and required additional attention, in the form of manual review.

Manual review is the practice in which merchants have employees directly contact potential customers in hopes of gathering more information about the order/cardholder to determine if the transaction should be accepted or rejected. Although currently used by 81% of merchants, manual review is expensive, a hassle to the customer and has limited scalability. As eCommerce continues to grow at a rate of 24% year-over-year, it is infeasible to assume manual review will be an effective/efficient merchant practice in the years to come.

In order to avoid time-consuming, labor-intensive review practices merchants can streamline their order acceptance process to accept more orders without personal interaction/screening. Merchants can retain more revenue if they are able to deploy more efficient means to add confidence in their order acceptance. One way to do this is to authenticate orders prior to sending them through fraud screening/review. Order reviewers typically review less than 20 orders/hour on average; with authentication in place, these employees can be deployed to new projects of priority (potentially as order takers).

Authentication allows merchants to validate that the customer is who they say they are, thus guaranteeing payment (per the rules of Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode). More orders can be accepted from current visitors to their site and they can do so faster, without disturbing the customer's experience.

Authenticated orders that may have previously been suspended for review, can pass directly through to authorization without merchant interaction. By implementing authentication, merchants have even greater confidence in the order, because Visa and MasterCard provide chargeback protection to all merchants that offer authentication on their sites.

Manual review may be a current trend in the marketplace (current statistics show that 23% of total orders are reviewed) but it is not scalable and can lead to disenchanted customers. In order for merchants to grow profitability in this ever-expanding, ultra-competitive market, merchants must find new ways to strengthen efficiency and improve order acceptance policies. Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode are an industry best practice to consider.

Contact CardinalCommerce Merchant Services Department to review your order acceptance process: 877-352-8444 or email Salesupport@CardinalCommerce.com.