UKNM: Credit Card Clearance/Payment Systems

[Ken Cowley]

Hello all from a lurker of a few months.


I'm doing some development work for a credit card clearance/payment type

service at the mo, but I've developed e-commerce sites too so this q has an

interest for me personally.


I'd like to know if anybody has any opinions on how these payment services

are/should be chosen - are all services the same? Does 'brand' mean anything

here (to the consumer, the developer or the vendor) is the brand just good

old VISA or AMEX? Do you just use what came in the Icat/Intershop box?


My own take on this is that for the majority of vendors the developer has

great influence - 'how do we get credit cards cleared?' 'Oh no problem, we

do it this way'. In turn as a developer I was heavily swayed by ease of

integration/documentation etc (which reflected on perceived 'quality of the

organization'). There's also a qualifying factor which is what bank the

vendor's got a merchant agreement with already, which sometimes limits the

field.


Anybody got any comments, even 'this is a commodity, I don't care' would be

helpful. For the record, I found Netbanx and Datacash did what they said on

the box, with Netbanx ahead on server reliability (at least during a period

of about three months a year back - Datacash people feel free to counter)

and Datacash ahead on integration (I'm a Microsoft Head, and they do an

Activex component - you have to punch a weird port number through your

firewall though).


BTW, and sorry for being off topic on my own posting, there was a thread re:

Scoot inserting their own banners a while back, which I picked up in digest

mode. When so alerted I put


<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--

if (top.frames.length!=0)

top.location=self.document.location;

// -->

</SCRIPT>


In my home page to get the benefits of Scoot's 'free listing' benevolence

without supporting the mugs who paid for banners on other peoples' sites.

There are other tests such as if(self!=top) etc.


Ken Cowley

kenvitamin [dot] co [dot] uk

Vitamin Limited

databases--web programming--e-commerce

http://www.vitamin.co.uk



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