How To Charge Appropriate Fees With The Credit Card Bin #
There are many businesses that use services such as merchant accounts which will
require a monthly membership fee and fees that pertain to sales made with credit or debit cards. In reality, there is little to no way to know if a card is a credit or debit card based on the number and just looking at it. Unless you can memorize every credit card bin # so that when you scan it you instantly know what it is, you will need some help from a tool.
The credit card bin # is a simple sequence of numbers from the first to the sixth digits of the card number. These are the important numbers which will allow you to learn everything you need to know about the card. The credit card bin # would then need to be entered into a search lookup for the credit card bin # database. This will allow for a simple relay of the available information on file with the service.
Charging Fees to Offset Card Costs
Since a majority of the businesses will in fact charge card use fees for their online services it helps to know what the card is in terms of denotation. Using the credit card bin #, you can understand whether or not the card that was uses was a credit or debit card. This is how you can put together a charge scheme to deal with the costs of the processing. The credit card bin # can help you to up-charge the appropriate amount when you are dealing with cards online. The most common option is to use the credit card bin # to find the denotation of the card.
What if the Credit Card Bin # Doesn't Provide a Denotation?
There will be some instances where the credit card bin # will not show up in the search. Of course this is only because these numbers were put into the system without a definitive answer. The best thing to do in this situation is to either charge all cards the same or to take the average between the credit and debit card values and charge that instead. Some cards register as both credit and debit and will not have a specific say in which it really is. To take some more control over the credit card bin #, it is recommended to check with different services if possible, as they may have different sets of information.
Otherwise, dealing with a credit card bin # is generally easy to use to determine what to charge customers that need to use a card as their payment option. A simple way to get the credit card bin # quickly to run this check is to look a at the bill that you prepare through your billing service and see the number they used as their credit card number. The credit card bin # should be the first six digits. You may also run into credit card bin # that are not in the list at all, contact one of the bin services to learn more if this happens.