Know Any UK/European Credit Card Lockbox Providers?
It's possible to avoid having to implement a PCI compliant solution for credit card processing providing you don't store or process the card information. One way of doing that is a lockbox provider such as Braintree.
We have a client that needs to defer the charging of credit cards until the shipping amount is known, but can't afford to implement a PCI compliant solution in-house. We're looking for a third party processor where we can seamlessly pass a card details using a form submission to their gateway to authorize (but not charge) the card, and then get an ID back that we can use to charge the card later.
Wondering if anyone had heard of/used a solution like this?
Most of the bigger payment gateways offer a hosted page that you redirect the customer to for payment. Perhaps you can find one that will do an authorization only? Then you can come back later and settle the transaction later with the returned transaction identifier? One issue that could come up though is trying to settle for an amount higher than the authorization amount.
-Marc
Say I'm an end customer in NYC. Client is in Washington DC along with their servers and payment gateway is in Utah. A blank form is transferred from DC to NYC. I fill out card details and hit submit. Transmission goes straight to Utah - never even touches the client servers, so PCI isn't an issue.
As you pointed out though, what is really needed is one of the secure lockbox style services as we need to be able to charge an arbitrary amount at some time in the future - not just auth now and settle later. Looking for european equivalent of Braintree as trying to avoid a system where the end customer has to go to a page branded by a third party such as Google or Paypal or the payment processor (e.g. RBS WorldPay).
Protx support deferred transactions with their VSPDirect system.
I found it easy to integrate with - although that was with PHP and they had an integration kit for this and ASP, but not sure about other languages.
It is possible to sign up for a Protx account as a developer and use the "simulator" or "test" servers. You only have to start paying when you want to go live and you can simulate without a merchant number - not sure about the test system.
All in all, it was a nice system to integrate with, although they had some slight hiccups and support was flooded with calls when 3D secure came in, I don't think they were half as bad as the competition and when you have integrated with PayPal anything else is easy :)
If a payment gateway offers a recurring billing service, you might be able to bend that to do what you want, but what you really want is a gateway that offers repeat payments. That's where you initiate a new transaction with the payment information used in a previous transaction (stored with the payment gateway). I don't what's available for the UK/Euro market, but I know Payflow Pro can do this. Authorize.Net and CyberSource can as well.
-Marc
http://www.protx.com/products/vsp_direct.asp
Also, while it offers deferred charges, that doesn';t work if we don't know shipping amount as we need the ability to change the total for the order before charging.
Oh well . . .
http://www.datacash.com/
Thanks!
If you look here, it tells you how to fulfill a transaction after you have done the "pre" whcih is auth. And amount is one of the optional parameters as in their XML example.
Might be worth speaking to their sales I would say.