what all do I need to do to accept credit cards online?

[dpopiz]

I've never done this before, so where do I start? and what "catches" do I need to watch out for?

 

[welst10]

paypal

 

[Kelemvor]

We use Verisign. You just need a processor to process the transactions on the back end. You can get places that you use their website and their forms and such and pay them a fee, or you can use more invisible processors that you just send your transaction info to and they process it for you. There are tons of options.

 

[Tweak155]

Originally posted by: welst10
paypal

 

[Drakkon]

paypal + cc account + checking account + about a week
you'll be good to go ready to accept CC payments

 

[Crucial]

I'm sure Rossman would know.

 

[Attrox]

I think PayPal is the easiest method to start accepting credit cards online. If you choose this route, go to Paypal to download and read their manual

If you want to do it via a non PayPal route you should:
1. Apply for a merchant account, this is where all the money from the credit card payments will wind up.

2. Make sure the merchant account can be connected to an internet payment gateway. One internet payment gateway that I recommend is Authorize.net and I think Wells Fargo merchant account works with it. The internet payment gateway is the services that you will use to authorize/verify a credit card transaction online.

3. Decide how do you want to authorize/verify credit card transaction online. Generally:
- Leave all the works to the Internet Payment Gateway
Generally speaking, your website will not handle any sensitive information (like CC#). When comes the time for your customer to enter their CC info, you direct them to the Internet Payment Gateway form (which normally you can configure to look like your site). The customer enter the info on the payment gateway page and will be redirected back to your site upon completion.

- You receive all the sensitive information on your site and have some sort of way to pass this info securely to the Internet Payment Gateway services (you have a script running to call their API or web services) who in turn respond back securely with the results. For this method it's absolutely necessary for you to have an SSL certificate like the one you can obtain from Verisign (Geotrust is much cheaper).

Hope this helps & good luck! :beer: