My Merchant Account Blog

Small Businesses Processing Credit Cards Like Large Corporations

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Most merchants are also customers online at one time or another.  The merchant probably goes online to purchase just about anything.  And as a merchant, you probably take notes on how that merchant's e-commerce website works - especially the check-out procedure.  When you enter your credit card number, you might notice the website will reject your order immediately if you accidentally did not enter enough or too many numbers in the credit card number field. 

This is one of the options to consider adding before trying to get approval from the merchant account provider.  Credit card numbers are determined by a specific algorithm - this is called the Mod 10 or Luhn's method (How Credit Card Numbers Are Determined).  You can ask your programmer to implement this feature.  By doing this, you prevent the transaction from going to the electronic payment gateway, saving you a transaction fee.

Also, have the developer add a feature to check the expiration date - to at least verify the credit card number has not expired.  If you use a drop down menu, sometimes the customer might click too fast and not notice.  For example, if the customer is placing an order today, and their credit card expires in December 2011.  When choosing the date, the customer might accidentally choose 2010.  This is another check that can be added to help save you a transaction fee.  Sometimes, the electronic payment gateway might actually approve the transaction, but you might get a chargeback from the issuing bank.

Once you have determined the credit card number matches the basic algorithm and the expiration date is valid, you are ready to submit the transaction to the electronic payment gateway.  Once this happens, you might get a dialog box that refers to Verified By Visa / MasterCard Secure Code (VBV / MSC, verifying ) (Verified By Visa-MasterCard Secure Code-Things You Should Know).  Implementing this feature can actually protect you from a certain type of chargeback.

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