Credit Card Processing Basics

In order to take credit cards, real time or not, you need to have or obtain a "merchant account". A merchant account lets you take credit card payments and is issued by a banking institution. If you don't have a merchant account see below.

Once you have a merchant account, you have to decide how you want to process the cards. The choice is between getting all order information together in an email (probably encrypted), or in charging the card in real time. If you are granting people access to information or files in real time you obviously have to choose the latter.

Merchant Account Institutions and Web Initiated Credit Card Transactions

If what you want to do is take credit cards, talk to your bank first about getting a "merchant account". If they give you a hard time, see the section below on "if you do not have a merchant account" for institutions which may be more in tune. If you want to take real time transactions, read on.

If you have a merchant account and you want to do real time transaction processing, you need to check with your bank and see who they use to process credit card transactions from the Web. There are so many fingers in these pies that it's hard to keep track, but we have found that the relatively simple software from Cybercash is often used for this, but your institution has to "work with" Cybercash in the sense of paying some small fee to them. If you are an International customer (not US), you can take credit cards via secure email, but you will need to set up a US subsidiary to do real time credit card transactions. We may be able you find a US "partner".

If you do not have a merchant account, or your bank does not work with anyone to process Web initiated transactions, there are other options that exist. One option is such companies as iBill which takes care of all the details for you. This does not require a merchant account, but they do charge a higher percentage of the sale as their fee.

Sending Credit Card Orders Via Email

If you don't need real time credit card transactions, the only trick is getting the merchant account as indicated above. Our shopping cart (and most others) come with built in defaults to email you order and payment information for charging and fulfillment. Our cart automatically encrypts the email if your "checkout form" lives on a secure server such as the secure area you get with your account from us. To set up encrypted email at your end, see the section on "secure server".

Setting Up the Automated Transactions

Assuming your institution works with Cybercash, there are three things that have to happen to get real time charging set up:

1. You have to fill out an online application with Cybercash.
2. Your banking institution or their intermediate processor has to notify Cybercash with your Merchant Id and Terminal Id numbers. To do this, they should fax the information to Cybercash at (703) 620-6703. 

We have to generate a public/private key pair, send it to Cybercash, and get you configured on our server's Cybercash software (there is a $250 one time setup for this, and we earn it).

It is best to decide on a business name and stick to it through these three steps, as believe it or not, that's how the pieces get put together at the Cybercash end.

Once the account is set up, your store can run in test mode for a while until ready to go "live".

Of course, you also need to hook your shopping cart, information area, files, auto-registration to the real time transaction process. Our shopping cart comes ready with "hooks" for this purpose, and we have essentially "off the shelf" solutions for file, information, and membership access control using real time credit card transactions as well. Give us a call about these applications as we haven't had time to document them and "can" them completely.