Re: [bitfolk] Payment service providers

Jan Henkins wrote: [snip] Talk of the devil. I originally founded The Linux Emporium and was responsible for the use of Protx as an intermediary. When I started doing mail order the credit card companies were almost totally ignorant of the web. Getting the right to do customer-not-present transactions was a bit of a nightmare, but they weren't the least bit interested in how I collected the orders from my customers - phone, fax, letter, web - it was all the same to them. For several years we simply used a credit card terminal as you would find in any retail outlet. The credit card companies insist on you (the business) taking all the risk in customer-not-present transactions, but I'm happy to say that we had not a single charge-back in that period. I think it had something to do with the fact that every order was reviewed by a person before processing. Later on the CC companies cottoned on to the 'net and brought in new regulations which required all orders placed via a web site to be processed in a different way. At this point I switched to using an electronic shopping cart and Protx as an intermediary. One odd problem arose at this point. Because it was possible to place very small orders through our system (as small as £1.50) it seemed to attract card fraudsters in the far east who would use it as a means to vet stolen credit card details. They'd type in a totally gibberish address and details and then use one credit card after another until they found one which was accepted. I presume they then went off to use it for a serious transaction somewhere else. I tried to flag it to the CC companies (since it was their new requirements which had opened up this hole) but I never managed to get past their front desk people who, not understanding the issue, assumed it wasn't one. I changed our settings at Protx so that when a customer placed an order the transaction was simply approved with the companies but the money wasn't actually debited. Then we did the old-fashioned manual review before actually letting it go through. It was over 5 years ago that I sold TLE, but I found Protx's systems a bit odd. They may have improved by now. They didn't seem to have much idea about how to produce meaningful reports, so reconciling each day's transactions was a nightmare. (Particularly compared to the old system with the CC terminal which simply printed a total at the end of the day which could be compared to the orders book total.) I would not use any system involving Paypal - too many bad experiences. I'm more than happy with direct bank transfer. If you're only making a payment once a year then where's the problem? Cheers, John