There are many online services for businesses to set up merchant accounts that will integrate to the web site. All require fees: a monthly fee, transaction, and account fees. Many also have Electronic Fund Transer (EFT) capabilities for taking checks. It's a simple matter to add the code to the your web site.

Your local banks may contract to a service that they require the business to sign up with for doing business online. If your bank provides the code online, it can be interfaced with the web site, but may require separate handling and expensive software for online credit card transactions. The monthly and transaction fees of online services are usually more palatable when balanced against other fees and balances your local bank will charge.

It's an old fashioned concept, but it used to be, when you sold something, you could write the credit card number on your deposit slip and the transaction would be processed. Now banks want to maximize their money including your chargeback fund and require a Merchant Verification System be installed.

Merchant Verification Systems work by verifying the information entered by the customer and comparing it to the credit card companies database listing. The rating scale is 1 to 10. A level of 6 or higher might indicate passing (depending on the MVS software and merchant levels set). The address field, for example, must match the database for 1 point. If the information entered by the customer matches the stored database information for the card number they enter, information like name, address, zip code, phone, etc., then the rating is the highest up to 10. If one of the fields doesn't match, a point, or some amount, might be deducted from the rating.

Merchant accounts carry additional requirements. For example, one concern may be chargebacks. If a customer cancels their order, the bank will make an additional charge to the amount paid. Banks may require a reserve in the account for chargebacks and may raise the limit for doing business online, and will require that a Merchant Verification System be installed.

OrderFormCity enhances the transaction process by encoding your customer's credit card number on their machine before it is uploaded to the server. Online banking services require that you use a secure server, however the customer's credit card number is not encoded between their desktop machine and the server. The orderformcity.com encoder solves the problem by encoding the number and then decoding it into the server's encryption process. If you can process orders without a Merchant Verification System the decoder can be placed on a CD or floppy for decryption on your (merchants) desktop machine so the raw credit card number is never exposed to the Internet.