subject: Merchant Warehouse Scam - Credit Card Providers [print this page] Credit cards have gained so much popularity amongst the masses that no company could be termed as complete and efficient if it doesn't use credit card services. Really, without charge card services, most of the businesses would end up losing a significant chunk of company opportunities. Some people go to the extent of classifying this kind of businesses (which do not use credit card services) as non-serious businesses.
So what are these credit card services that we are talking about?
In basic words, by credit card services we mean the capability to accept credit cards like a mode of payment. Well, we can also term the use of credit cards like a charge card service. Nevertheless, usually, credit card providers will include the services that enable acceptance of charge card by a merchant. So, for a shopkeeper, use of charge card processing machines to accept charge card payments, is really a charge card support that he is supplying to his customers (and he himself is receiving this charge card support from the provider of charge card processing machine and others involved in producing this process so smooth). Since carrying cash is no much more a common practice, any shop that doesn't use/provide such charge card providers would end up losing a lot of clients simply because customers can't pay with anything other than a credit card. So, for most merchants, supplying charge card providers (or credit card processing services) to their clients, has turn out to be really important part of company.
With the web boom, came a lot of online companies. These businesses had been within the form of virtual shops (or e-shops) that existed either only on the internet or had been a virtual extension of physical shops. All these businesses (some selling goods, some selling providers), needed a way to accept payments from their clients. This gave birth to online credit card services. The simplest use of these on the internet credit card services is within the form of a basic webpage/web-form that asks you to provide your credit card details. These details are then verified and processed to debit the amount from your charge card and credit it towards the merchant's accounts. Since credit card particulars are sensitive info, these websites started implementing mechanisms/technology to secure it and prevent it from obtaining within the hands of fraudsters. Such sites are now called secured websites and form the backbone of e-commerce.
Besides these fundamental ways of implementing credit card services, the credit card services are provided in some other forms too e.g. over-the-phone payments utilizing credit cards, use of third party on the internet credit card service providers who provide you with an interface to accept charge card payments.
So, there are a great deal of different methods in which credit card services are implemented and as the time goes by, the expense of these credit card providers is certain to improve.
