Credit Cards

aaron_karp

Is anyone interested in slowly walking me through the steps of accepting credit card payments for my clients? I'm a developer with sufficient PHP/MySQL knowledge to build a shopping card site and all. I just don't know how this whole merchant account thing. But please explain things in great detail, because I'm very very new at this e-commerce thing. Thanks.

stolzyboy

well you will first need a merchant bank to process the back end potion of the credit card system, such as retriever, then you will need a front end processor, such as verisign, these two work great together, i have worked with both, there are some abnormalities to getting it setup, but i would suggest you contact retriever first, get your information, then contact verisign, and they will help you out with setting your payment forms to them

superwormy

Yeah its very dependent on who you go with for a merchant account / merchant services, they should supply you with directions though ( usually its POSTing a form over SSL ) and usually its very easy to setup.

Arc

You dont have to use Verisign or any SSL certificate company.. You can use SSL without it and save the money... However, your users will get a Security Alert popup box saying this site is not certified or whatever.

jayc

If you want a quick solution, you can go with PayPal since there is no application process like with a merchant account. The rates are probably a little higher than you will find with some of the cheper merchant accounts, though. I think it's 2.7% + $30 but after 90 days and $1000 gross/month it jumps down to 2.2% or something like that. Oh and you can get 1.5% cash back if you use the debit card that you can get after 30 days.

Just thought I'd mention it as a possibility.