Archive for the 'Site News' Category

A new article has been published today that we are very excited about. Merchant Accounts 101 covers the ins and outs of merchant accounts.

Covered in this article are:

• The Players

  Find out who’s who in the merchant account business. We start at the top with the big card associations and work our way down to the sales agent who establishes your account.

• Types of Accounts, Credit Cards, and Transactions

  Before you can begin to understand what fees you will incur by accepting credit cards you have to understand the environment in which you are accepting them. Learn how your style of business, type of transaction, and type of credit card affect the fees you pay with every transaction.

• Processing Fees

  The fees associated with accepting credit cards is the first thing most merchants think of when they think of a merchant account. And yet most merchants do not understand exactly what they mean or how to determine which plan is the best for them. We explain what the fees are that will be charged for each transaction and how to determine what rate structure is the best for your business.

• Surcharges

  Ever wonder why some credit card transactions cost so much more then others? Ever wonder why all of the transactions your process are not at the rate your sales agent quoted you? This is because surcharges may apply to your transaction. We explain why surcharges may occur and how much they may affect your rates.

• Monthly Fees, Annual Fees, and Other Fees

  It seems everything a merchant does incurs a fee from their merchant account. We outline and explain the most common ones and let you know which ones should not be there most of the time.

• Establishing a Merchant Account

  Once you understand your rates and have chosen a merchant account provider you need to begin the processing of establishing your account. We detail the aspects of this and what you need to be aware of to ensure a quick and easy process.

• Security and Risk

  The first thing a merchant thinks of when they think about risk is fraud. Merchant account providers think even deeper then that and that can have a profound effect on your processing experience. We’ll explain the various factors surrounding security and risk with merchant accounts so you don’t have to worry about your money being in limbo.

• Getting Started

  Once your merchant account is established your responsibilities as a merchant are not over. You still need to verify your merchant account was established properly. We’ll outline what you need to do to make sure your new merchant account stays hassle free for the lifetime of the account.

So read our article Merchant Accounts 101 and let us know what you think about it in our Merchant Account Forums.

We are happy to announce a new article has been published today. Integrate the Authorize.Net Recurring Billing API with PHP is a follow up to our article Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP. This new article expands upon our original article by explaining how the Authorize.Net recurring billing API works and walks developers through the process of:

1. Writing a class in PHP that simplifies the Authorize.Net API so it is easier for us to work with
2. Using that class to establish a recurring billing subscription
3. Understanding what we need to do to successfully establish a subscription logically

As with our previous articles sample code is included.

So check out Integrate the Authorize.Net Recurring Billing API with PHP and let us know what you think in our Merchant Account Forums.

It is our pleasure to announce our first article aimed directly at web developers. Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP walks developers through the process of identifying the steps of an online credit card process both from a programmatic point of view as well as a technical point of view (from web page to processor and back again). It then explains how credit card related data should be validated before being used for payment.

The heart of the article lies in the PHP code that is developed along the way. A class is created that handles everything from sending the data to the Authorize.net API to receiving and handling the response. The client side code can be as little a just a few lines of code to successfully process a transaction. Because the code is designed to be modular it can be easily reused in any web application without having to rewrite any portion of it.

So check out Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP and let us know what you think.

Within the next 7 - 14 days a new article will be published on Merchant Account Services. This article will be geared toward ecommerce developers who wish to utilize the Authorize.net payment gateway into their websites (or their clients’ websites) using PHP. We chose PHP since that is by far the most popular language out there for the web and yet still has so few quality resources available for it.

The article will explain the flow of an ecommerce transaction and educate developers on how to handle them. Credit card validation will be included as well as code for integrating Authorize.net into the website. The code will be reusable as well so it can be duplicated easily on future sites.

Keep an eye out and when it is published be sure to tell your web developer friends where to find it.

Technorati Tags: authorize.net, ecommerce, payment gateway, php

As vast as Wikipedia is it is far from complete. One thing I found lacking was the overall contributions for merchant services related topics. It seems that those of us in the merchant services industry are either to lazy to contribute or just not savvy enough to provide Wikipedia with good content. We’ve identified a few solid contributors, to whom we tip our caps to, but overall this category is just under-represented.

So, Merchant Account Services has decided to make the Wikipedia Project our project. Our goals are simple:

1. Identify merchant services related topics
2. Categorize them
3. Contribute new content and improve existing topics
4. Create new articles for topics not yet represented

To get things started we have created a Merchant Services category. So far we have four articles listed: Authorize.net, Chargeback, Merchant Account, and Payment Gateway. I am sure there are more that can be added to it.

And we do not want to do this alone. Anyone who understands how Wikipedia works and would like to contribute is more then welcome to do so. We have started a new forum to keep track of our progress. Feel free to let us know what you’re working on.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, merchant services, merchant account, authorize.net, payment gateway, chargeback