Real time credit card transactions

What does it mean to accept real time credit card transactions? What advantages does this merchant account feature offer?

Real time credit card transactions simply means that your website can authorize or decline a credit card as soon as the customer tries to purchase.

This type of integration involves what is called a payment gateway service. A real-time payment gateway takes the credit card information inputted to your order form and securely interfaces with your merchant account (to authorize or decline transaction).

Payment Gateway Service Providers can do the following:

• Authorize charges to the card before letting the transaction go through
• Automatically capture and secure funds from the sale
• Verify the address of the card and expiration date of the credit card
• Check that the credit card has not been reported lost or stolen

Many payment gateways also offer a secure web-based 'Virtual Terminal'. From a virtual terminal you can process credit cards by hand or issue credits to your customers for returned items or refunds.

If your merchant account interfaces with a payment gateway you can have the funds deposited directly into your bank account.

The alternative to real time credit card possessing is to collect the user credit card information and store it in the database.

This alternative might be easier to setup at first, however for every transaction you will need to re-key the credit card information into your processes. This credit card process can become time consuming.

If a credit card declines you will need to contact the customer and or cancel the order.

The MonsterCommerce e-commerce solution interfaces with a more than a dozen gateway providers:

• 2Checkout
• Authorize.Net
• Bank of America™
• CyberSource
• iBill®
• LinkPoint™ API
• LinkPoint™ HTML
• Moneris
• Paymentech™
• PayPal™
• Plug'n Pay
• Skipjack
• VeriSign Payflow Pro®
• USA ePay™

Credit Card Processing >> The Bottom Line:
Find out from your merchant account provider which gateways they are compatible and setup real-time credit card processing. It will save you time, headaches and a lot of bad credit card transactions!