I have a few questions about Authorize.Net - e-commerce

My customer has revenues of 10.000 per week so I'm looking for a professional solution. I need a good payment gateway for my shop (Drupal Ubercart). I was considering to use Authorize.Net. Is it available in Europe ?

If you are in europe, please consider Ogone.

SagePay, Wirecard, and CyberSource are all good gateways in Europe. I've had really good experience with the support staff at Wirecard in particular.

For those that stumble upon this question, Authorize.net now supports UK and European businesses: http://www.authorize.net/en-GB/
I believe they're also adding support for Canadian businesses as well.

It is not available in Europe. It is only available for US based merchant accounts. You can take European credit cards through Authorize.Net but only if you have a US merchant account.
From their FAQ
At this time, we are only able to offer our services to U.S. based businesses, or merchants who have U.S. based merchant accounts.

Why don't you consider PayPal it is one of the widely most supported Payment Gateways, it works in Europe as you requested and from my knowledge is easily integrated/setup with ubercart.

In my opinion Authorize.net is the best payment gateway out there.
Also to quote their FAQ's:
Does Authorize.Net support
international transactions?Yes.
Merchants can submit transactions to
the payment gateway on behalf of
non-U.S. customers. To do so, the
merchant's bank account must be with a
financial institution located in the
United States, and the merchant must
be configured to accept the customer's
card type: Visa, MasterCard, American
Express, Discover, JCB, Diner's Club,
or EnRoute. The payment gateway will
submit the amount of the transaction
to the customer's card issuer, who
will then handle all currency
conversion to U.S. dollars. Since
default Address Verification Service
(AVS) settings may cause foreign
transactions to be declined, merchants
who plan to regularly accept
international transactions should make
sure that their AVS settings are
configured to meet their business
needs.
So this is the one I would choose and it is not very hard to implement.

Related

How is the correct way to pay my customers

I want to create a platform where I have 2 kinds of users, Seller and Buyer.
Let's imagine that the Seller is selling a $10 product and I need get 10% of the value to me. Which is the correct way to do that transaction? The buyer need to pay to my account and I transfer the money to the seller after that? How can I do that transaction in a secure way for me and my customers? I need use gateways like Stripe or Paypal for that?
How the majority of platforms pay me with only my bank data? In platforms like Amazon, Shpfy... I think they don't have a person that do manual transfers every day for each seller.
You need Stripe Connect that allows you to work with merchants and payout them. Let me know, if you have a question with Stripe and Stripe Connect.

Access and donate to PayPal Giving Fund charities via an API

I would like to access the list of PayPal Giving Fund charities so that a user of my site/app could eventually donate via credit card or PayPal.
I have looked into other APIs, like Just Giving, Orghunter, Charity Navigator, all in which don't have a large variety of charities.
If you've ever visited the site https://www.humblebundle.com the idea is very similar to this. To give you an idea, it'd go something like this:
I select charities for the user to donate to for a certain category (environment, animals, etc), save to db to retrieve specific charities later
User sees charities to divide their donation using sliders. They have the possibility to swap out charities if don't like selection
User enters amount and enters their credit card or paypal account
I make the connection to PayPal API to make donation
User then gets a receipt or something like a tax receipt
I guess the questions I'm asking are:
Is there access to a list of Giving Fund charities via an API
Is it possible to donate to charities from the Giving Fund list via the API
Would this API be available to an Australian PayPal account
If there is no API for Giving Fund, is it possible to retrieve a list of charities to do this via another route in PayPal
Will there be any restrictions on the Apple and Android stores if this was an app
Thank you so much for your time!
Have you checked out www.pandapay.io ?
To answer your questions:
Is there access to a list of Giving Fund charities via an API
PandaPay has a database of every 501c3 in America, check out Pandasearch: panda-search.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Is it possible to donate to charities from the Giving Fund list via the API
Yes, check out www.pandapay.io/docs
Would this API be available to an Australian PayPal account
PandaPay currently only works for USD, and payments to US-based charities. That being said, most international charities have a US branch to access the American charity market (largest in the world, by far)
If there is no API for Giving Fund, is it possible to retrieve a list of charities to do this via another route in PayPal
Is PayPal really a necessary factor for your use case?
Will there be any restrictions on the Apple and Android stores if this was an app
PandaPay is closely modeled on Stripe's API, and thus iOS and Android SDKs can easily be written for easy usage in mobile applications.
PandaPay API: https://www.pandapay.io/api-reference
Stripe Example: https://stripe.github.io/stripe-ios/docs/index.html
OrgHunter can authenticate more 501(c)(3)s (affirmative or revoked) including a large number of those with affirmative determination by virtue of the fact that they are subordinates of "Group Exemptions".
In addition, the OrgHunter database includes the most robust set of charity data attributes.
Access to the dataset/platform is by API or WordPrss, Drupal, Concrete 5 plug-ins. In addition, there are .NET and standard PHP implementations.
Comparing Just Giving, Orghunter, Charity Navigator, and PayPal Giving Fund is like comparing apples to oranges to bananas to kiwis.
Just Giving focuses on tools and systems for charities, corporate programs, and campaigns on an international basis, although they did just "acquire" the assets of "JustGiving.org" as a way to expand their footprint in the United States. OrgHunter is a platform supplier inclusive of data, donation processing and compliance, upon which tech philanthropists build software and web apps connecting and routing diversity of donors to diversity of charities. Charity Navigator focuses on ratings. And finally, the PayPal Giving Fund serves PayPal customers by enabling them to make donations to a charity of choice with the following two requirements/caveats. 1. A charity MUST ENROLL in the PPGG to receive donations from the PPGF, AND 2. to receive grants, the charity MUST ALSO create a PAYPAL ACCOUNT into which the PPGF will deposit donations. Unless the policy has changed within the last two months, the PPGF will ONLY deposit grants into a PAYPAL account, otherwise the donated funds are distributed elsewhere. This is in part why the PPGF is now dealing with a class action lawsuit that asserts that PPGF was engaging in deceptive practices.
A couple of comments about your idea, particularly as it is reflected on https://www.humblebundle.com.
In all circumstances, the moment someone starts doing any sort of fundraising online, they are subject to the various fundraising and solicitation regulations of the 50 states, because "online" by definition crosses state and international borders. The IRS may determine if a charity is a legit charity, but the states govern and regulate the conduct of fundraising and solicitation.
People cannot solicit for a charity or use charity brands or trademarks without explicit permission. That means that if you want to feature, promote and fundraise for a particular subset of charities, you will need to get the charities to opt-in or buy-in to your process or program. There are companies that do this, however it is a daunting, full time job.
An alternative to enrolling and managing charities is to give users/customers the opportunity to designate a charity of choice, and thereafter "route" their contribution through a 501(c)(3) "Donor Advised Fund" to the destination charity. That is what the alliance of OrgHunter and Make My Donation do. They integrate the most dependable charity database with donation processing and regulatory compliance into a cohesive platform that is easy for software and web app developers to build into their applications that are used to support all sorts of good causes.

How to enable to enable live credentials for REST API direct Credit Card Payments

I seem to be unable to enable Live credentials to accept direct credit card payments for Paypal REST API. Here is what I do:
Log into http://developer.paypal.com
Go to application tab and click on my application name
In the ACCEPT PAYMENTS section it shows:
Accept credit cards directly Enabled for test only How to enable live credentials?
I click on 'How to enable live credentials' link, which further opens up the following:
Important Live credentials are disabled for this feature. To enable
direct credit card processing, please provide addition information
about yourself and your business.
To meet regulatory requirements, we need to collect your business details. This may include:
U.S Business owner Social Security Number, date of birth, and other personal details.
U.S Business Tax ID (EIN, ITIN) and other business information.
Get started
I click on the 'Get Started' Link and am only taken back to the My APP section of the Application tab.
After step 4 I went to go about trying to find a direct link to how to get the process started and came up with the following:
Followed the the following instructions:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/lifecycle/goingLive/
While I do now have API Signature Credentials including, API username, API password, and Signature, it still only shows that for "Accept credit cards directly" I am only "Enabled for test only"
I would greatly appreciate any advise or alternative solution to get this fixed.
Thanks!
Sev
If you have US Personal PayPal Account in Live , You will not be able to Direct Credit Card Payments in Live . This is currently a Limitation. You need to upgrade to Business Account with Mobile Payment Library or Website Payments PRO Account as mentioned below. There is no ALternative available at this time
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/rest_api_payment_country_currency_support/
Direct Credit Card Payments
The PayPal REST API supports direct credit card payments, which are credit card payments without a separate web approval flow, in the following countries:
Canada*
United States
United Kingdom*
* Direct credit card payment outside the US requires a Website Payments Pro account (available in the UK and Canada):
Website Payments Pro (UK)
Website Payments Pro (Canada)
In supported countries, the PayPal REST API allows direct credit card payments that use the following currencies:
Currency Currency Code
United States dollar USD
Pound sterling GBP
Canadian dollar CAD
Euro EUR
Japanese yen JPY

Payment Gateway process

I have to integrate a payment gateway in my web app. I am negotiating with PGs to get most suitable offer. Most of them have:
Setup Fees
Annual/Monthly Fees.
Per Transaction Fees (1%-5%)
Rule of thumb is- Higher the setup fees, lower Transaction Fees.
My question here is "Are payment gateways compulsory?" I have used several sites like ebay, flipkart, amazon etc which take credit card info directly on their portal, authorizing it directly from bank, bypassing 3rd party payment gateways. (This is how it seems.)
What happens behind the scenes here? What is the process to directly accept payments and authorize it from bank?
What tentative transaction volume is needed to make the above scenario profitable?
I used to work for bluesnap (previously called Plimus) which is an on-line payment-processing company. A payment-processing company - is a company that authorizes and charges the credit-card against the processing gateways.
Many people confuse payment-processing companies with processing gateways. As a small business you can either use one of the payment-processing companies or use self-service such as Authorize.net, Paypal etc.
There are plenty of resources over the web that explain about payment-processing but I don't think that it will be very interesting to read, unless you decide to build your own gateway...
In order to work directly against one of the gateways you need to process millions of transactions per day - which I don't believe you have the capacity.

Advice on stopping donation fraud

I work for a non-profit organisation and have created and online donations page. Recently this donations page has been used to validate stolen credit card details via the process known as Carding.
The way it works is that a slacker get hold of a whole bunch of credit details but doesn't know which numbers are good or not. So they go to a donations page and attempt a small donation ($5 or less) with the stolen card number. If the donations goes through then they can use the number for bigger purchases.
Carding can cost a non-profit a lot of money as most these "donations" will end being reversed and in some cases a charge back fee will be charged by the bank.
Has anyone else had experience with this? Also, what are some ways that I could stop it?
Off-topic, but I'll bite:
Don't accept "small" donations.
Don't accept "many" donations from the same IP address in a "short" time span.
Consider buying credit card fraud insurance.
What "small," "many," and "short" means is up to you.
If you're not doing this already, consider using PayPal exclusively for accepting credit cards.
With no programming skills required, our Donate button is an easy and affordable way to start accepting donations online.
Discounted rates for 501(c)(3) status
Your donors don't even need a PayPal account
Accept all major credit cards
Source
What they say about fraud protection:
If there's one thing people know about PayPal, it's how seriously we take security. Behind the scenes, we work to help keep you and your donors safe from fraud.
Automatic Fraud Screening
Guard your business with our relentless fraud screens, address (AVS) and card verification (CVV2) checks, and 128-bit encryption—all included at no extra charge.
PCI & CISP Compliance
PayPal adheres to international PCI (Payment Card Industry) and CISP (Cardholder Information Security Program) standards for data protection. These standards are designed to help protect your business from fraud and loss of data. Because we handle the payment card information, you don't have to worry about meeting compliance standards yourself or storing your customers' sensitive financial information.
Full disclaimer: I have no affiliation with PayPal or any credit card company. I do not run, or have any first-hand experience with, an e-commerce site, nonprofit site, or any other web site which accepts electronic payments. I am not a lawyer. I'm just a programmer.