[ic] Merchant ACcount

[Chris Wenham]

On Tuesday 20 May 2003 01:04 am, Andre Bunting wrote:
> I got a question about merchant accounts..
>
> IS there any restrictions on what merchant accounts would work with IC ?

 Only that they work with a payment gateway supported by Interchange.

 There's three pieces here: Interchange, which talks to the payment gateway, 
which talks to your merchant account. 

 What the payment gateways are doing is providing a server that Interchange 
can connect to securely over the Internet, and the gateway in turn has some 
kind of physically secure connection to the credit card networks (which are 
NOT on the Internet).
 You need to either chose a gateway that's compatible with the protocols used 
by your merchant bank, or chose a merchant bank compatible with the protocols 
supported by your gateway.

 The only gateway I've used is Authorize.Net, and to get an account with those 
guys you need to go through one of their resellers. There are a bunch of 
others that Interchange supports, and from a quick glance at the Vend/Payment 
directory they are:

CyberCash
Signio
Bank of America
ECHO
Skipjack
WellsFargo
CCVS (orphaned software)       
MCVE
TCLink
iTransact

 I've no experience with any of these except CCVS, which is actually not a 
payment gateway but a program that uses a modem to directly dial into the 
credit card processor--so you need a phone line hooked up to the server. 
Unfortunately the company that makes it was aquired by RedHat, who (like 
Interchange), decided to dump it a year later. I don't think anyone controls 
it anymore.

 If you've already got your merchant account then you'll want to go through 
the above list to find a gateway with support for one of the protocols your 
merchant bank supports. Most banks/gateways support more than one protocol, 
so there's usually plenty of overlap.

Regards,

Chris Wenham
www.synesmedia.com