What is required when accepting online payments?

If you’re accepting payments online, you’ll need the use of a payment gateway in addition to your Dharma account. Without a gateway, Dharma would have no way of securely getting orders from your website.  Hackers are always on the hunt for new ways to steal sensitive data, and that’s why gateways exist – to protect merchants and customers from fraud.  Without a gateway, merchants would be forced to use other, less secure methods of data transmission to send transactions to their processing bank.  When that happens, fraud becomes much more likely, which can be incredibly costly and frustrating for any organization. That’s why Dharma includes access to the MX Merchant gateway to all new merchants, free of charge. 

Think of it this way – without a payment gateway to automatically send requests to processing banks, merchants would have to rely on old-fashioned methods.  That would mean that merchants would be forced to call every single customer, and then manually enter credit cards into a terminal over the phone.  Not only is this time consuming, but it’s impractical and expensive.  A gateway provides for automated, encrypted approvals, in real-time.  With a payment gateway account, merchants can automatically take thousands of online orders per day, without having to manually involve themselves in the payment process. In addition, specific fraud-containment tools are available to help merchants really control what types of payments they’re taking.  Just what the online merchant needs!

Since the fundamental purpose of a gateway is to securely store credit card data, a gateway can use that data for many additional tasks. Other reasons that merchants may use a gateway:

  • If you need to securely store your customer’s credit card data for re-billing
  • Automated Recurring Billing
  • Invoicing
  • Ability to “Authorize only” – meaning that you can validate a card in real-time, but wait until later to charge it. Great for hotels, car rentals, etc.
  • iPhone/iPad processing

See how MX Merchant can help you accept online payments and provide additional tools!