The Internet represents a tremendous opportunity for your business -- whether you're a budding entrepreneur looking to market and sell your great new idea or a large corporation searching for new ways to increase sales.

We are here to help you!
We are here to remove the barriers that might prevent you from doing business on the Net.

Any business needs to be able to process credit cards in order to avoid losing sales. On the Internet, credit cards are the major payment method. Processing credit cards requires two elements.

1. Transaction Gateway: The transaction gateway provides secure processing of the customer's credit card information in real time via the internet. The information is validated and authorization is returned to the merchant site securely and in real-time.
2. Merchant Account: The Merchant Account is the mechanism by which a business (the merchant) accepts payment by credit card.  The merchant is issued a number to identify all of the merchant's transactions and to have the funds from those transactions deposited into the business checking account of the merchant.

Gateway Options

You will have to decide if you will process credit card purchases off-line, or have the processing take place across the Internet in real time. There are various payment systems available to suit your needs.

Off-line Processing
There are many possible software solutions that allow you to securely download your customers' credit card information and process the payment off-line, using the merchant terminal you already have. Some customers prefer this method because it allows them to verify the validity of an order before beginning the process of collecting funds.

Online Processing and Payment Gateways
are preferred by companies that sell lower priced products. Payment gateways are companies that verify an online customer's credit card details and perform the actual charge in real time. They provide a web-based interface for your transactions and provide information on the validity of the transactions.

Let's mention some of the most popular payment gateways:
Authorize.net
Card service International
Cyber Cash
Internet Secure
Planet Payment
WorldPay

Soon, after we finish our testing and cooperation of this and other gateway providers, we will give more detailed description (and ranking) of the main providers.

Security

This is all about keeping credit card information away from prying eyes. This is no longer a must do from a customer point if view, but is now required by VISA and other providers. Encryption is the process which provides this security by changing credit card information into a meaningless jumble until it is converted back to usable information once the data is moved to a secure location. There are two techniques that are currently in wide use to provide this security.

SSL
...requires an electronic certificate from a third party who can prove that your customer is dealing with the firm they think they are. The most well known provider of certificates is Verisign, which purchased Thawte, a relative newcomer in February of 2000. Verisign certificates start at $349. Thawte's certificates start at $125 per year. There are significant differences in service.

These certificates provide proof of identity that cannot be forged, assuring users that your site is protecting valuable data from prying eyes. They also enable the encryption of all communication between you and your customers using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, which enables all major browsers to initiate a secure session with your site.

The main drawback to this server based method is that it is symmetric i.e. the means to decrypt is also present at the site, as all encrypted data must be decrypted before being sent to the vendor. This means that if the Web site is compromised either externally or by ISP/Web server staff, all credit cards will be freely available to the hacker. This represents a fundamentally higher risk for the provider of the e-commerce service than, say Actinic Catalog, which uses end-to-end asymmetric encryption, explained in the next paragraph.

128-bit Encryption key
… is more sophisticated and difficult to break than SSL. SSL offers only a 40-bit key in non-US implementations (although 56-bit key implementations are now becoming available). To put things in context, each additional bit of key space takes twice as long to break. So a 41-bit key is twice as strong as a 40-bit key. The 128-bit key is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 times as strong as the SSL 56-bit key. Encryption occurs on the buyer's PC and decryption only occurs on the vendor's PC. At no stage is the transaction decrypted while it travels over the Internet, or while it is stored on a Web site.