How Online Credit Card Processing Works
The basic process requires three components.
The first component is a merchant bank account.
The second component is a processor or third-party processor.
The third component is a payment gateway.
Certain connects to your PayPal account via a Certain e-commerce account connection.
Internet Merchant Bank Account
An Internet merchant bank account is required for merchants who wish to sell goods and services over the Internet and accept credit cards as payment.
This type of account is different than a typical merchant account and is considered card-not-present, like mail-order / phone-order (MO/TO) merchant accounts.
Merchant accounts are different from checking or savings accounts because they allow you to process credit card charges into it.
Because you can issue refunds from this account into people's credit cards, the merchant account application process includes a credit check that is more rigorous than that for checking/savings accounts.
Banks are effectively issuing you a credit line when you get a merchant account.
Thousands of banks issue merchant accounts, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase Paymentech.
Processor
A processor is a large data center that processes credit card transactions and settles funds to merchants.
A processor connects to the merchant on behalf of an acquirer via a gateway (such as PayPal or Cybersource) or POS system to process payments electronically.
Processors edit and format messages and switch to bankcard networks.
They provide files for clearing and settlement and other value-added services.
The processor may be the acquirer bank, or it may be a third-party processor.
There are only a small number of payment processors, which all banks use.
Examples include EDS Aurora, FDMS (Nashville), Global Payments (Central, East), Nova, Paymentech, and Vital (Visanet).
Other related terms:
- Acquirer: A bank or financial institution that issues merchant accounts for the acceptance of credit card transactions.
- Acquiring Bank: The bank that maintains the merchant relationship and receives all transactions from the merchant.
- Third Party Processor: A non-member agent, employed by an acquiring bank, which provides authorization, settlement, and merchant services to the bank's merchant.
Payment Gateway
Certain currently integrates with the following payment gateway products:
- PayPal PayFlow Pro
- Cybersource
- Authorize.net
- Pay.gov
- Chase Orbital
- Stripe
- Shift4
Shift4 is specific to the Accommodation section to generate payment tokens to be stored for room guarantee, and cannot be used in forms to process online payments.
If you have an existing internet merchant account that is set up to accept card-not-present transactions, contact one of the above providers to set up a payment gateway account.
Once the payment gateway account is set up, simply create an E-Commerce account within Certain, and input the username and password to connect to your payment gateway.
If you do not have an existing merchant account, cannot get approved for one, or do not want to have one set up, then you can contact PayPal directly and ask for information on setting up a PayPal Website Payments Pro PayFlow Edition.
Note: When contacting PayPal and requesting the "Website Payments Pro PayFlow Edition," ensure that you specify you need a "separate PayFlow gateway using PayPal processing and access to the PayPal Manager".
Configuring Your Certain Account to Process Payments
Once you have activated one of the payment gateway products listed above, an administrator-level user should enter the payment gateway account details (variable by gateway) into the Certain E-Commerce settings.
Navigate to Account Settings > Registration > Financial Data.
Click Add New in the E-commerce Accounts section.
Enter the payment gateway details.
Click Save.
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