Retailers increasing demand for e-check services, Dydacomp says

With the eCheck.Net service recently integrated into its Mail Order Manager order management system, Dydacomp figures e-checks will account for about a fifth of payments for its participating merchants, Dydacomp president Robert Coon tells InternetRetailer.com.

“I can see e-checks generating about 20% of payment processing by our merchants,” Coon says.

Since Dydacomp began offering the eCheck.Net service integrated with its Mail Order Manager system last month, as many as 50% of Dydacomp’s 10,000 merchants have indicated they will use the integrated eCheck.Net feature in the near term, he says.

The eCheck.Net service, which is provided by Lightbridge Inc.’s Authorize.Net Corp., lets online consumers pay with checks by entering their checking account numbers and bank routing numbers into data-entry windows on retailers’ web sites, following a procedure similar to entering credit card information. Consumers can also use checks through call centers by giving their checking account information to customer service telephone reps. Authorize.Net then processes the e-checks through the Automated Clearing House Network to transfer funds from consumers’ bank accounts to merchants’ accounts.

By integrating eCheck.Net with Mail Order Manager, retailers save the time and labor it takes to enter account data, Coon says. In the past, he says, merchants that used Authorize.net to process checks would have to enter account data twice, into the Authorize.net system and the Mail Order Manager system. “Then they’d have an accountant go into the systems to reconcile the data,” he says.

Now, online consumers enter their information directly into a web form, which automatically enters the data into the Mail Order Manager system, Coon says. The Mail Order Manager system, originally designed for catalog merchants, now includes a SiteLink feature that integrates the M.O.M system with retail web sites.