Facilitate E-Commerce with Cybercash and IIS
Chances are that your business has taken advantage of the Internet's marketing potential by registering a domain name and developing a Web site that promotes your products and services. People who seek product information by going online are primed for purchasing; the best time to encourage an online purchase is when Web surfers are visiting your site. But if these visitors must write down online order information and then call your fulfillment center, you stand to lose sales.
E-commerce lets you process payments in realtime for orders that customers place through your Web site, eliminating the need for your customers to take additional action, such as making a separate telephone or fax order. Your customers receive order confirmation immediately, and you no longer need to manually verify contact and payment information. In this article, I will give you an overview of the e-commerce payment process and describe a powerful freeware program—CyberCash, which you can use with Internet Information Server (IIS)—that lets you accept credit card payments over the Internet. (Although CyberCash works with previous versions of IIS, in this article, when I refer to IIS, I mean IIS 4.0.) After you're in business online, CyberCash's CashRegister administrative software helps you maintain your site transactions.
The E-Commerce Payment Process
E-commerce credit card purchases and traditional physical-store credit card purchases have the same result but differ notably in execution. Let's look at a typical payment scenario for each of these processes.
Physical-store purchase. A customer travels to and enters the physical storefront. The customer selects the items he wants to purchase from the store's display and places the items in a shopping cart. When he has all the items he wants, the customer takes the items to a store employee at a checkout counter for purchase. The checkout clerk adds the prices of the customer's items, calculates sales tax on the total, and asks for payment. The customer produces his credit card. The checkout clerk swipes the credit card through a credit card machine and requests an authorization from the credit card issuer to charge the amount of the sale to the customer's card.
The credit card machine automatically sends the authorization request to a credit card processor or to the merchant's bank electronically. The card processor verifies the merchant's identity and requests the authorization of the purchase from the card issuer. The card issuer compares the credit card and purchase information with the cardholder's current balance, credit limit, and card expiration date. Based on this comparison, the card issuer sends either an authorization code to OK the purchase or a decline code to refuse the purchase.
The card issuer's code travels back to the merchant's credit card machine electronically. Assuming the code authorizes purchase approval, the merchant's machine automatically prints a charge slip. The customer signs the charge slip, takes his copy, and departs the store with his cool new stuff.
If the merchant didn't request a funds transfer during the authorization process (an auth-only transaction), the merchant generates another transaction based on the authorization number the card issuer provided. This additional transaction requests that the card issuer transfer the amount of the customer's purchase from the customer's credit card account to the retailer's bank account. Retail stores don't usually execute auth-only transactions but rather authorize and capture funds in one transaction (an auth/capture transaction). In general, retailers use auth-only transactions when delivery of a product or service is not immediate upon purchase, such as when a customer registers for a training class or places an order for an item the retailer must back-order.
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