Reviewing the Best Merchant Account Providers

Periodically this site will review the offering of select merchant account service companies, highlighting the work of those that offer exceptional service. Today the featured company is SecurePay.

The company has been in business since 1997 and today serves thousands of eCommerce sites across the country with a variety of payment gateway solutions, both standard and customized for those with more specialized needs. They provide a necessary service to anyone operating a business online.

At this point there may be question: “What exactly is a payment gateway?” And there are cases where businesses are considering offering online credit card processing, but get intimidated by the jargon. They cruise various merchant service websites and feel they are going to have to learn a foreign language just to make the decision.

Any time someone is feeling information overload in a situation like this, a good solution is to break each feature down, one at a time, and explain it so the confusion can dissipate.

So today’s term will be “payment gateway.” Just like a gateway in a fence is the entrance to a garden, a credit card gateway is an entrance to your processor. Your card-processing vendor provides you with a means to communicate online with your credit card processor. A gateway is the equivalent to the hardware terminal you would find in your department store.

A more technical explanation is that a payment gateway is an eCommerce application service provider service that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, brick and mortar, etc. It is just like a physical point of sale terminal you find in any retail store. These gateways encrypt sensitive information, like credit card numbers, to ensure all information passes securely between customer and merchant.

It works like this. A customer orders something from a online store by pressing the “submit” button on the checkout page. The customer’s web browser will then encrypt sensitive information (credit card number and expiration date) so it can be sent safely to the merchant’s web server. This is done using an SSL (secure socket layer) encryption.

At this juncture the merchant passes the transaction details to their payment gateway, which involves another SSL to the payment server hosted by the payment gateway. The gateway allows the transaction to securely move the process to the merchant’s bank, which sends it to the acquiring bank that issued the credit card.

When the purchase is approved or denied the information passes back through the gateway in reverse order, completing the transaction.

In addition to making the transaction easier, gateways also provide the necessary security to curtail issues of credit card fraud and identity theft.

For specific information on SecurePay, visit: www.securepay.com.