Online Credit Card Processing

Online Credit Card Processing

If you need to accept online credit card transactions on your own server, you will need an Internet enabled merchant account and an SSL certificate.

For security reasons many companies choose to use a third party payment processor to handle credit card transactions but if you decide to accept credit card details on your own server than an SSL certificate in essential. You should be aware that an SSL certificate only guarantees the security of the credit card data as it is transferred between the customer’s browser and your server. Once the credit card numbers have been collected they need to be transferred to a secure PC that has no outbound internet connection as soon as possible.

An SSL Certificate is an electronic document that contains the information necessary to establish a secure SSL connection. When used in credit card transactions, the Web site collecting the credit card information and the site to which the information is being transmitted must both have an SSL Certificate. Some cheaper SSL certificates will cause security warnings with older browsers.

An internet enabled merchant account lets you to accept credit and debit cards as payment for the purchase of goods and services. There are a few different types of merchant accounts. Internet merchant accounts tend to charge a higher amount per transaction than standard merchant accounts. Bank charge a higher percentage because of the increased fraud risk of cardholder not present (CNP) transactions.