There is nothing more important for a company that accepts debit card/credit card transactions to their business than a reliable, secure link between its paying customers and the bank. And in simple terms, that’s exactly what a Gateway (PSP) is: your link to the bank.

 

Any business wishing to accept card payments MUST have a gateway service( PSP) in order to transfer customer card details and payment instructions to the bank. This connectivity is essential to processing payments to your merchant account through to your business bank for settlement within 3 working days.

 

Ecom6 supply a range of other complimentary software as standard, such as a ‘virtual’ online terminal for processing manual transactions, and a range of online reporting and management tools.

 

Ecom6 provide all the necessary solutions for your business to accept debit/credit card payments. That includes a means for transferring sensitive customer card and payment details from the internet to your acquiring bank for processing funds.

 

The Ecom6 Gateway will authorise or decline a card payment based on the same principles as a Chip and Pin machine - these include whether there are sufficient funds available, whether the details all matched correctly and whether the has been any fraudulent activity. In order to check these details, the Payment Gateway will liaise with the Card Schemes and Issuing Banks within thousands of a second and report back with its findings and relevant transaction response.

 

If the credit or debit card payment has been authorised by the Payment Gateway, then the transaction will be reported as authorised and the Payment Gateway will generate an Authorisation Code to the Merchant and the consumer, again by a realtime response. The Authorisation Code means that the Merchant has been reserved that amount of funds from the consumer's credit or debit card. The consumer will now have a smaller available balance on that card account and will have purchased the good(s) or service(s) from the Merchant via the Payment Gateway. At the same time the Merchant and consumer receive their confirmation Authorisation Code, the Payment Gateway will enter the transaction into a settlement file. Every night a settlement file will be sent by the Payment Gateway to the relevant Merchant Acquirer, ready for the Merchant Acquirer to complete the monetary transfer from the reserved funds on the consumer's credit or debit card account over to the Merchant's business bank account.

 

In order for the authorisation and settlement process to occur via the Payment Gateway, the Merchant will be required to set up a Merchant Account with one of the Merchant Acquirers. The Merchant has the choice of three types of Merchant Accounts - ecommerce, MOTO (Mail Order Telephone Order) and PDQ (Chip and Pin). Via the Merchant Account, the Merchant Acquirer is then responsible for the transfer of funds from consumer to Merchant, following the confirmation settlement file from the Payment Gateway.