Benefits of using virtual cards for eCommerce business

To understand why virtual corporate cards are safer than traditional commerce spending cards, you’ll have to first understand how they are different from them. 

A virtual card just like other cards has a 16 digit card number, an expiration date, and a CVV or security code. The two major differences are, first, it is linked to a credit or debit account but not directly to a bank account, and, it doesn’t have a lot of personal information other than your name attached to it. 

So how does this help? Well since it is not directly linked to a bank account, it becomes tough for hackers to commit fraud even if they somehow access the card number; the name on the card is not associated with an individual’s personal account or company’s bank account and since the card acts as a virtual visa debit card, rather than a physical plastic card, you’re not at risk of losing it somewhere or it getting stolen. 

For each virtual cards that you create, you can set a spending limit on it. This will help eliminate out-of-policy expenses by automatically declining any transactions over a certain limit. 

You can even set up approval workflows for each card that you create. This is useful when you give the responsibility of conducting payments to an employee, but you still want real-time control over each spend.

So by setting yourself as an approver for a card transaction, every time your employee tries to execute an eCommerce card payment, a notification will be sent to you. This way, you don’t have to sit and do all the payments but are still in control of the money that is going out.

If your eCommerce store sources products from many vendors, chances are that it is tough to manage payments for each one of them as it is difficult to keep track of who has been paid how much. But since you can create unlimited virtual credit cards, you can make a card for every vendor that you have.

This way, you’ll know exactly how much you’ve paid each vendor so far through a single glance at your cards dashboard. Using virtual cards for B2B payments in this way simplifies the complexities of vendor management and ensures accuracy in your financial transactions.

Now that you have a virtual card for every vendor, keeping track of refunds also becomes simpler as your supplier refunds it back to the same virtual card that you used to pay them. This negates the confusion you would normally face when trying to track whether a refund has been processed by a particular supplier or not.  

Similarly, virtual card payments for accounts payable team can be easily managed, as each transaction is clearly tied to a specific card, making it simpler to track payments and refunds for various suppliers.