If you are selling online, or plan to sell online, you need to be able to process credit cards. This means you’re going to need a shopping cart system and credit-card clearing service.

 

Payment Methods

 

Third Party Payment Methods

The quickest methods to implementing credit card clearing is to use a third party intermediary. Some of the services we have implemented include:

• Stripe
• Paypal
• Realex
• Sagepay
• AIB Merchant Services
• Sagepay Integral

These methods process the payments on their website and then return the user to the your website once the payment has been processed. They are quicker and cheaper to set up initially and they offer mangement panels to monitor payments and perform such tasks as refunds if necessary.

Pros

• Cheaper setup (makes sense for a startup),
• Quicker for customers who have their details saved when using on another site

Cons

• Usually take a bigger percentage cut of the sale
• Consumer leaves site during payment processing

Direct payment Methods (Realex)

Our preferred credit card clearing software, that we currently use with our long-term clients, is developed by Realex Payments and has proven reliability.

 

Processing credit card orders online is a relatively complicated process. It requires a few key components:

1. A Secure Server (https) so that payments are processed over an encrypted
2. An Internet Merchant Account with a bank that can accept charges and credit them to an account.
3. A Credit Card Clearing Service (or Transaction Processing Service) to provide the flow of information from the server to the account.

 

Silverarm Solutions Ltd. we implement a secure credit card clearing service for each e-commerce site we set up. This entails:

• A secure, bank certified and approved payment-processing service
• Automatic and delayed settlement, with the option to process delayed settlement requests from fulfilment systems.
• The option to send additional reference data with each payment request for ease of subsequent reporting and reconciliation.
• A real time reporting system that provides a rich and powerful search function along with the option to process ad-hoc payments, voids, refunds etc.
• An integrated transaction fraud scoring service that pattern checks all data for each transaction across multiple accounts.
• 3D secure plugin – a protocol designed to be an added layer of security for online payments.

 

Pros

• Better rates (makes sense if your site has or expects high sales)
• Payment all happens on your website

Cons

• More expensive to implement