Credit Card Processing for E-Commerce Websites

If you intend to use your website to sell products or services online, you need to consider how you will process credit card transactions. You may choose to use your website to simply capture order details from your customers, and to manually transfer those order details into your existing order fulfillment system.

Alternatively, if you wish to automatically authorize incoming credit card transactions, and to simplify the settlement and management of those transactions, you can take advantage of the online credit card processing services available through one of Decentrix's two e-commerce integration partners: Paymentech or Authorize.net.

Although both Paymentech and Authorize.net offer online credit card processing services, there are important differences between the services that they offer, and below we will briefly explain those differences.

Paymentech

Paymentech is a traditional Merchant Account Provider. Their computer systems communicate directly with the various credit card issuers to authorize and process credit card transactions in real-time on behalf of their clients, who are called merchants. If you have a merchant account with a Merchant Account Provider, you can only process online credit card transactions if your Merchant Account Provider offers services that allow such transactions to be transmitted over the Internet.

Paymentech offers this of service to online merchants via its "Orbital" line of merchant accounts. Decentrix has integrated its E-Commerce solution with the Orbital system for Paymentech merchants. Unfortunately, at this time, an Orbital merchant account can only be used to process online purchases, so if you have an Orbital merchant account and you also sell products over-the-counter, you cannot use your Orbital merchant account to process over-the-counter credit card transactions.

Consequently an Orbital merchant account from Paymentech is suitable for businesses that only sell online, or businesses that are willing to use different merchant accounts for online versus over-the-counter transactions. If this works for you then contact Decentrix Customer Support to find out how to apply for an Orbital merchant account from Paymentech.

Authorize.net

Authorize.net is not a traditional Merchant Account Provider since they do not directly perform credit card transaction processing. Instead, they can communicate with other Merchant Account Providers who do process credit card transactions. Authorize.net simply provides systems that can accept online transactions and forward those transactions to any of its compatible Merchant Account Providers. This type of service can be described as an Internet Payment Gateway.

If you have a merchant account with a Merchant Account Provider that does not accept online transactions directly, you may still be able to process online transactions by applying for an Authorize.net account (this is only possible if your Merchant Account Provider is compatible with

Authorize.net, however many are compatible). You should note that Authorize.net may charge service fees in addition to the fees charged by your Merchant Account Provider.