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How the Merchant Process Works
This is the person shopping on your website who wants to purchase your product and/or
services. Your Customer is able to do these things safely and securely at your website
because you have given them a page protected by a SSL certificate, like CTssl, which will encrypt their payment and personal information
before their payment is processed.
Your Customer has added the item they want to their shopping cart and they are ready
to purchase. The Cart in question can be an actual shopping cart application (CTzencart, osCommerce, Storefront,
Cartweaver, etc.) or a simple page where they can enter their payment information.
Once your Customer clicks the "payment" button, all of the data that the cart has
stored is compiled into a format that can be easily passed on to the Payment Gateway.
Information that is gathered by the shopping cart is passed on to the Payment Gateway
(Authorize.net, USAePay, etc.) where it is checked to make sure that it is complete
enough to send off to the Credit Card Company. The Payment Gateway then determines
which Credit Card Company is needed to manage the transaction and then sends the
information on to them.
The issuer of the credit card validates all of customer information - credit card
number, billing address, etc. Once verified, the Credit Card Company will send an
acknowledgement back to the Payment Gateway so that the transaction can be processed.
Should the transaction fail, the Credit Card Company will send a denial code back
to the Payment Gateway that indicates what problem was encountered with the transaction
(the Customer can then choose a different payment method or cancel the purchase).
If the transaction is a success, this information is relayed to the Customer, usually
in the form of an "Order Confirmation" or "Thank You" page. In addition, the Payment
Gateway initiates a funds transfer, also referred to the settlement request, for
the purchase amount (minus the transaction fee and discount percentage) to the Merchant
Account for deposit.
The Merchant Account receives funds from credit card purchases and then makes scheduled
transfers to a merchant's bank account. This is, essentially, the final step in
the whole Merchant Processing scenario which takes literally seconds to complete.
Funds collected into a Merchant Account are generally transferred over to the merchant's
regular account within 48-72 hours.
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