[TriLUG] OT: credit/debit card processing.

[Phillip Rhodes]

gregbrown at mindspring.com wrote:
> Luggers:
> 
> Have any of you set up on-line credit and debit card processing software/websites? 

Yep, spent most of the last 5 years doing just that.

> If so, what back-end software did you use?  


Originally, our own in-house processing software, written
against the Vital protocol.  I never worked with that much
as we were moving away from that when I joined the company.

A long time ago, something called CCVS from RedHat.  I don't know if
it's still available or not, as RH got out of that business,
and sold it off to somebody else, or just dropped it, or something, a 
few years back. Even if it were available, I'm not sure I'd recommend 
it. We had issues with it not being 100% compliant with the processor
protocols, which meant we got hit with costly non-compliance
fees from the processor.

After that, we used something called PC-Charge.  It was
windows based, and worked reasonably well when we were
processing through Vital.  But when we switched to First Data,
PC-Charge never did get their FD support working correctly.
They promised and promised it, and sent new version after new
version to us, and it never worked right. We finally gave up
and ditched it.

After that, we switched to a web-based service from a company by
the name of Linkpoint.  They provide an SSL based processing
service, and an API that can be used to call into their
service. We used the Java API (all our web stuff was J2EE)
and that worked reasonably well.  The downside to their service
is, you have less control over things.  For example, when you
run your own processing engine, you control the time the
settlement process runs.  With linkpoint, you are stuck
with the settlement running when they decide to run it.  That
might or might not be an issue to you.

By and large though, Linkpoint's service works well, and it's
what we used for the last 2-3 years or so.  At least, they
were still using it when I left the company.

 >  I'm strating to dig around for solutions.  I'd like the software
 > (back-end especially) to be linux or OS X based.
 > Any pointer would be greatly appreciated!

I'm not sure that there are a lot of *nix based processing
engines.  The only one I was ever truly familiar with was
the aforementioned CCVS.  Probably there are others, and I'm just
not familiar with them.  I do know that there are essentially
no F/OSS ones, as the credit card processors generally provide
their protocol specs under an agreement that requires they
be kept secret.

And finally, if it comes to it, you can always write your
own processing engine. The processing provider your sign
up with will provide you the specs for their protocol and
you can write your own software, if you *really* want to do that.
It is time-consuming, error-prone, probably expensive, it means
dealing with certification testing, constantly updating the
software to match changes in the protocol, blah, blah.  But
it also provides the ultimate degree of control, and you can
run on any platform you choose.  The one I mentioned
at the beginning of this message ran on OS/2. :-)


TTYL,

Phil
-- 
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