On Wed, 23 Dec 2009, Daniel Jalkut wrote: } Does any of the merchant's account services offer a similar } convenience to PayPal, where the merchant service provider takes } responsibility for storing the credit card number of your customer?
I remember posting a year or so ago about this, but no, you don't need to store any credit card info [in fact, in many cases it is not permitted by VISA, MC, etc]. You can still issue refunds/credits/etc months after a purchase via the payment gateway. Having used authorize.net for many years, the fees are insanely low when compared to all of these paypal-like services [and you actually can call someone when you need to and talk to a human within a few minutes]. Setting up a merchant account with your bank is recommended regardless of who you use for payments, since accounting is a lot simpler if you have a business account and a personal account and keep them 100% separate. There are many resellers, but I have found dealing with authorize.net direct has resulted in the best service and payment option [$50/month, no transaction fee - this is good if you have a high number of transactions, otherwise there's a $15/month, plus 0.20 transaction fee]. You do have to pay a small percentage to VISA/MC/Amex, etc, and there are add on features that can give you some extra security regarding fraud, but unless you're selling $1,000 software, the default AVS protection is more than secure. Even so, AVS protects against quite a bit of possible fraud [i used authorize.net for a site that sold $$$ birding optics and it only missed 2 transactions that were clearly fraud, but because i settled manually 5-days a week, the cards were never charged the money, though it was ear-marked for up to 7 business days in case we did need to charge them]. Going back to the original point - you can opt to collect the numbers and CVV number [though storage beyond a few seconds is not allowed], but there is no need to, since the gateway has that info and you can issue refunds, etc via them w/o having to know the original number. The biggest 'downside' to this? You have to make or use a shopping cart that talks to the gateway. This is *very* simple, however and if you're just selling a few items, it is something you can whip out in an hour if you only type with one hand. :) [and there are dozens of OSS shopping carts you can study if you need insipiration]. HTH, /vjl/
