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> Alright, so I got the SSL working, and I'm pleased with that,
> now my head is spinning with the possibility of credit card
> usage on my little higher-educational website (I'm tired of
> doing job boards, admissions applications). I have no idea
> what I need in order to do this. Do I need some credit card
> hardware? Some sort of networkable swiper box? Can I do it
> with just cold fusion and an I.P. address? Babe in the
> woods, here, people.
Oh boy... Here's a question w/ no easy answer...
There's about a million & one ways you can do credit card processing.
First question: Do you have a merchant account with a bank, or do
you think you can get one easily (IE: established company w/ good
credit rating & in good standing w/ the bank)?
If the answer to that is NO, then you'll need to user one of the
various services that provide full credit card billing w/o the user
needing a merchant account. I'm not sure whether you're selling site
access (or other intangibles) or if you're selling a product, but
that would affect your choice of processors. This type of processor
will charge you a mint for their services, but they might be your
only choice if you can't get a merchant account. They also usually
add additional fraud detection systems which are EXCEEDINGLY useful
for membership-type sales. Some places to start looking:
www.ibill.com, www.ccbill.com, and a sh'load of others I can't think
of off the top of my head. IBILL has been our best bet for a while
now. We DO have a merchant account, but the reduction in fraud w/
IBILL's fraud detection and negative database has MORE than made up
for the 15% cut they take for their service.
If you do have or can get a merchant account, you'll likely want to
look at processing the cards through your own account. That way,
you'll probably end up paying minimal fees (3-5%) and perhaps a small
per-transaction fee ($.10 - $.35 per charge).
Now... Simply having a merchant account doesn't magically get you
Internet CC billing (bummer...). You'll need some software to pull
it off... CyberCash seems to be a popular choice. Depending on your
bank, the CyberCash transactions fees might be covered for you,
leaving you only the 3-5% bank cut. Our bank covers the CyberCash
fees for us.
That said, I haven't been too thrilled w/ CyberCash personally. I'm
especially displeased w/ the ColdFusion options for accessing the
CyberCash servers. On CyberCash's side, Address Verification
Services (AVS) are frequently unavailable even for cards that I
*know* support AVS. That makes it tougher to control fraud.
As for the ColdFusion software, it's kind of a mess... CyberCash
doesn't actually supply CF tags or anything of the sort. They give
you a COM object, but the amount of supporting code to drive the COM
is pretty heavy. That code is available in Perl, C, or ASP, but not
CF. Porting it would NOT be fun... There are a number of CyberCash
tags available from third parties. Allaire & ONCR both make tags.
Allaire's only does authorizations, not batch settlements, and it's
not thread safe (CFLOCK is a MUST!). Version 3 of the ONCR tag seems
to leak memory during auths, but it does handle batch decently. It
WILL occasionally crash however. That leaves your batch in an
unknown state & requires much manual intervention & cursing to
straighten things up. That happens perhaps once every two months or
so. ONCR does have a version 4 available of their tag which they
claim is much better. I'd give it a try if not for the $ticker
$hock....
Even with all those caveats against CyberCash, I feel it's the best
solution available if you have a merchant account. I'd certainly be
interested in others' experiences with other processor software, tho!
Hope that was at least helpful. I can provide more detailed
information about either IBILL or CyberCash when you decide which
route you're going to take.
Best regards,
Zac Bedell
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