[Techtalk] e-commerce

[Glenda R. Snodgrass]

> I work for a small company that's looking to add online payments to 
> traditional payment methods. We're looking at a handful of online payments 
> a month; no more. (But they're big payments from far away, so it's worth it.)
> 
> This area is completely new to me. Is there anyone out there who has 
> experience with e-commerce and can tell me what I need to know?
> 
> A question in particular: normally you would have an online system to enter 
> the credit card information, and another system that actually performs the 
> transfer of funds - usually through a middle-man. Can we do the transfer 
> part through the mail, so as to avoid going through a middle-man?

Normally you set up a merchant account with a bank, and an account with an
Internet payment gateway which that bank uses (like Authorize.Net or
CyberCash).  When a payment is made, the Internet payment gateway
processes the payment, sends you a receipt, sends info to the merchant
bank, which gets the money from VISA or whomever and deposits it into your
checking account 2-3 days later.

The big question is whether you save credit card numbers and run charges
to those numbers each month (in which case you can save the cc numbers on
an internal server and run a batch file to upload for processing as
needed, save and easy to do), or whether the client logs in and puts in cc
number and payment info each time they want to put in a payment (in which
case you post directly to your Internet gateway from a secure server and
you don't have to save cc info at all yourself, also safe and easy to do),
or whether the client logs in and puts in only the amount and uses a
stored cc number (which is the riskiest method and thus the most complex
to set up).

-- 
Glenda R. Snodgrass

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