[ic] ICVerify & Charge Cards

[Jim Balcom]

JP>>> My personal preference would be for you to go with ICVerify. They are
JP>>> well established and well respected.
JP>>
JP>>ICVerify? Any link with Interchange? We are located in Canada...
JP>>Is it a payment gateway or internet merchant account provider?

They are not a merchant account provider. 
Here is my scenario:

I am using a Point Of Sale software called Retail Plus, written by a
Canuck. (I've not been able to understand IC enough yet to the store
running under IC.)
My Merchant Account Provider (MAP) is First Charter Bank in Beverly Hills
California.
My MAP uses First Data Merchants Systems (FDMS) to do the backend work.
They are located in Hagerstown, MD, about 75 miles from my office.

The orders come in to me via e-mail from my store. As a matter of
convenience, I print them out for the paper record. I enter the order
in to Retail Plus, including the charge card info.

Retail Plus creates a '.REQ' file in one of ICVerify's directories.
This is a flat, comma delimited file with the data in a sequence
prescribed by ICVerify. ICVerify sees that file, reads it and converts
that to a format that FDMS wants to see, picks up the modem, calls an
800 number to FDMS and passes the string to them. FDMS checks the
database to see if this card number will hold this amount of money and
then sends a response back. ICVerify hangs up the modem and reports
back to Retail Plus.

At the end of the day, I have to 'settle the batch' of all of the
transactions for the day. ICVerify calls FDMS to tell them that it's
closed. FDMS then tells First Charter to add that amount to my checking
account. Monday's sales become available on Wednesday.

Once a month, First Charter Bank deducts 20 cents per transaction from
my account, they deduct a percentage of the gross sales (which for most
businesses is less than 3%), and a $10 statement fee from my bank
account.

That's the scenario.

(My previous processor did not require that I settle the batches. They
took their discount and transaction fees off the top of each
transaction before they sent them to the bank. They also charged me a
'Tech Support Fee' of $25 per month.)

In this version of Retail Plus, he is only passing a 'C1', to indicate
that it is a charge sale (other codes are in the ICVerify
documentation), the charge card number, the expiration, and the amount.
There are numerous other fields in there that I hope that he will start
using in his next version, like putting in the street address and zip
code of the billing address so that Address Verification Service (AVS)
can be used.

Have I thoroughly confused you?

-= Jim =-

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Tagline for Wednesday, April 11, 2001 at 07:50 AM:
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