Questions for Credit Card Processors

If you are considering using a company to process your credit card orders here are some questions you may wish to ask in order to get a feel for how they may meet your needs.

Please note : I offer no guarantees that you will have a happy and successful trading relationship with any credit card processor even if they answer every questions perfectly. These questions are here to help you make an informed choice.

Hopefully these questions will help you find a reliable, secure payment service provider to handle your transactions. Don't be fooled into believing that setting up a credit card processing company is vastly expensive undertaking. If your read the Linux User article located at http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/images/stories/pdf/lu7-Linux_at_Work-Making_it_pay.pdf you will see it describes how a company used cheap commodity hardware similar to your home PC, free software, and a bit of software development to create a payment processing system. This is why you need to ensure the bank with which you hold your acquiring account approve of the credit card processor you choose, and you need to ensure you are happy with the service they can offer.

Has the company met the Visa AIS requirements, and if so how long ago were they approved?
Ideal Answer : They were approved in mid 2003 (or earlier)

Visa AIS is a series of standards for ensuring card details are stored and handled properly, it is important that the PSP takes security seriously and as such should have met the requirements as early as possible. More details can be found here.

How long have they had Visas 3D Secure and Master Cards' SecureCode available for use on transactions made by the public?
Ideal Answer : Before 2004

3D Secure and SecureCode are Visa and Master cards' current attempts to reduce Internet based fraud, they work by asking the user to enter a PIN or pass phrase when the transaction is being made, and thus they should be as secure as a ATM card. More details can be found here for 3D Secure, and here for SecureCode.

What is their support technician to customer ratio?
Ideal Answer : 1 technician to 100 customers or less.

When things go wrong you want to be able to get hold of someone. In my view 1 technical support person to 10 customers is very good, 1 to 100 is reasonable, 1 to 500 is bad, 1 to 1000 is appalling.

What hours can you get support from them, and what is their out of hours support technician to customer ratio?
Ideal Answer : 24 hours a day with a similar rules to the technician/customer ratio as above.

If you're planning to get orders 24 hours a day then you'll need 24 hour a day support, and you need to make sure they offer it. If their systems have problems between 8pm and 10pm at night you want to know their technical staff are available and you don't want to find that out of hours support is a single technician who carries around a mobile phone.