Archive for Online Payments
Here is a quick ecommerce tip when shopping around for a merchant account/gateway provider:
Do Not Sign Long-Term Merchant Agreements!
If you shop around a bit, you can find merchant account/gateway providers that do not require a long term commitment. Long term agreements benefit the provider and not you as a merchant. Signing a long term agreement commits you to staying with a processor regardless of your satisfaction and in some cases pricing changes. Cancellation fees and terms are hard to find in an agreement so check very closely before you consider canceling your existing plan or signing up with a new provider. Read more... (123 words, estimated 30 secs reading time)
Accepting credit cards as an online merchant has its inherent risks. And while sooner or later, you will get scammed, its important to keep it in perspective. Your business will need to take credit cards to be successful online. The goal is to keep your fraud percentage as low as possible. In fact, you will need to do so, or your merchant account processor may freeze or suspend your account. New merchants (or those with a new web urls) should be especially cautious since scammers often target new merchants. They can estimate how old your site is by looking at your domain registration date. Read more... (199 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)
Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) is something that every merchant who accepts credit cards needs to know about. Failure to adhere to the standards can expose you to significant financial liability as well as have your merchant and gateway accounts shut done.
The PCI security standards are a blanket of regulations set in place to safeguard payment account data security. Essentially, they define the best practices for storing, transmitting, and handling of sensitive information over the internet. Compliance is mandated by the payment card brands (Visa, MC, Discover, etc) and not by the PCI Security Standards Council. The standard is set by the PCI Security Standards Council. Read more... (327 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)
I just updated our 6 part introductory tutorial on the practice of accepting credit cards. We still have some tweaking to do, but the basics are out there including a new video animation of the process. The tutorial can be found here: Credit Card Tutorial
If you prefer just a quick overview, check out our video animation found here: Credit Card Acceptance animation Read more... (99 words, estimated 24 secs reading time)
