Hello,

I was wondering if someone could help me with the following questions:

1. What is the easiest way to check to see if someones credit card details are valid? (I am not billing them, just using their CC details as security.)

2. When a customer uses too much bandwidth & you wish to charge him for it, how do you do that without breaking the law? (i've heard you can only charge someone for something they have previously agreed to purchase...)

3. Anyone use 2checkout.com? Are they any good?

Thanks in advance for any help.

I THINK that if you word your TOS right, then you should be able to charge them for bandwidth legally. If you say in it, You agree to us charging you for extra bandwidth.

Just contact the person before they go over and ask if they would like to purchase additional bandwidth. If not, place the account on hold. It is hard to bill them for bandwidth that they have already used.

Originally posted by davidb
I THINK that if you word your TOS right, then you should be able to charge them for bandwidth legally. If you say in it, You agree to us charging you for extra bandwidth.

It's not a problem of Terms Of Service but of credit card processing. Most smaller hosts do not have a full merchant account and are not able to debit the card directly, so they would have to send the client a bill and ask for payment.

If you get a full merchant account you will be able to do an "Auth-Only" transaction, where you can do everything like normal when charging a CC, but it doesn't actually charge them. So it would run through AVS checks etc...

Also, if you state in your TOS, you should be fine.