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How to process Credit Card / Debit (Interact) transaction?

Hi,

I'm trying to integrate a credit-card / debit card processing for my company. Right now i have a pin-pad infront of me. I have no ideas how to go about link it with the bank. I can communicate with the pin-pad without any difficulties.

I have three questions
1) Can anyone tell me how does the credit/debit card process work in Canada and US?
2) Do I have to use a specific pin-pad for certain bank? or can I just simply use the same equipment for all service provider?
3) Any good service provider for Canada and US that accept Debit(Interact) and Credit card processing?

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Richard Quadling

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coreybryant

It depends on what country you are in - Canada or the United States. And then if you are wanting a swiped account or an internet account.

For an internet account in the United States - a customer enters the card number and it goes to the electronic payment gateway (i.e. LinkPoint). Then it goes to the transaction processor (i.e. First Data) - who will approve or deny the transaction if they have the relationship with the issuing bank. If not, they will send the transaction on thru to the card association (Visa, MasterCard, etc) for approval. Then the transaction makes its way back down to the website

-Corey

Richard Quadling

I would be interested in what you actually ended up doing with this.

geoffryf

ASKER

Hi RQuadling,

After read over your writing, i had a better over-view of what's really going on with the Payment Processing. Also, i've realized from your writing, i do not necessary have to deal with bank directly.

Therefore, I've end up using 3rd party API to perform many operations such as sending Track1, Track2 info.

The company I deal with provide implementation information documentation and sample code. However, i'm still unable to implement debit card.

I'll keep this post updated when I figure out how to implement the debit card process with pin-pad.

Geoffry Fang

Richard Quadling

In the UK, dealing with the bank tends to be the easiest to implement as they will provide the kit, but it is probably more expensive overall and if you have hundreds of tills, it gets VERY VERY expensive.

With a third party system, you may still need to get the system commissioned before you can use it. This will define the type of card, floor and ceiling limits for the cards/company, etc. Hot lists (banned cards), etc.

In my work, I only ever needed to deal with Track2. You can normally tell the system what you want the start/mid/end sentinels to be and then you can also decode the track, but normally you just grab the data and push it straight to the library.

Due to my development environment, I ended up using a file exchange method and had the server watching for closed files in a specific folder. This was great as you could queue the transactions based upon date time in the filing system rather than hoping the server API could handle them all in memory.

Also, with the server method, the actual comms lines don't need to be 1 per till. You may have a pool of lines supporting MANY tills.

But, having said all of that, for a single terminal, I would recommend using the bank. In the short term, you get the transaction processing you need without the overhead of development/testing/commissioning costs - which if you get it wrong for the testing, you have to pay again for another round of testing.

Anyway.

Good luck. I did find this an interesting project.

Richard.