Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Real-time credit card processing

[Kurieuo]

Hi all,

I'm looking into having credit cards processed in realtime on my website, but it is all fuzzy to me how the process works.

As far as I understand, you have your order process (i.e. shopping cart), then you have a payment gateway (i.e. I'm looking at eSec - http://www.esecpayments.com.au/) merged in with your shopping cart which allows you to process the credit card and transfer funds securely to a bank? Is this right?

I'm a bit unclear about what places like eSec are for. Is the process something like this:
You get clients order -> you get credit card/payment details -> you send credit card and payment details to eSec -> eSec sends all details to bank -> bank sends confirmation to eSec -> eSec sends confirmation to you.

Is this how it works? This would mean you get charged by eSec for the transaction, and then charged again by the bank who processes the payment (do banks charge for the processing?)?

If you were handy with programming skills, couldn't you just connect directly to your merchant bank account yourself? A connection doesn't sound too hard to me. Do banks usually provide information about how to connect to them?

Thanks for any info,
Kurieuo.

[Luxore]

You need a merchant account (to charge credit cards)

You need a checking account (into which your merchant account will transfer the funds they collect for you)

And you need a channel for requesting credit card authorizations (either a physical device to swipe the cards if you are a walk in shop, or a service like authorize.net if you are an online service)

Some merchant account providers also provide a virtual terminal, or an api, like you would get from authorize.net, but in my experience they charge extra for the service, same as the independant providers would.