Archive for the 'Site News' Category

It is our pleasure to announce our first article aimed directly at web developers. Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP walks developers through the process of identifying the steps of an online credit card process both from a programmatic point of view as well as a technical point of view (from web page to processor and back again). It then explains how credit card related data should be validated before being used for payment.

The heart of the article lies in the PHP code that is developed along the way. A class is created that handles everything from sending the data to the Authorize.net API to receiving and handling the response. The client side code can be as little a just a few lines of code to successfully process a transaction. Because the code is designed to be modular it can be easily reused in any web application without having to rewrite any portion of it.

So check out Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP and let us know what you think.

Within the next 7 - 14 days a new article will be published on Merchant Account Services. This article will be geared toward ecommerce developers who wish to utilize the Authorize.net payment gateway into their websites (or their clients’ websites) using PHP. We chose PHP since that is by far the most popular language out there for the web and yet still has so few quality resources available for it.

The article will explain the flow of an ecommerce transaction and educate developers on how to handle them. Credit card validation will be included as well as code for integrating Authorize.net into the website. The code will be reusable as well so it can be duplicated easily on future sites.

Keep an eye out and when it is published be sure to tell your web developer friends where to find it.

Technorati Tags: authorize.net, ecommerce, payment gateway, php

As vast as Wikipedia is it is far from complete. One thing I found lacking was the overall contributions for merchant services related topics. It seems that those of us in the merchant services industry are either to lazy to contribute or just not savvy enough to provide Wikipedia with good content. We’ve identified a few solid contributors, to whom we tip our caps to, but overall this category is just under-represented.

So, Merchant Account Services has decided to make the Wikipedia Project our project. Our goals are simple:

1. Identify merchant services related topics
2. Categorize them
3. Contribute new content and improve existing topics
4. Create new articles for topics not yet represented

To get things started we have created a Merchant Services category. So far we have four articles listed: Authorize.net, Chargeback, Merchant Account, and Payment Gateway. I am sure there are more that can be added to it.

And we do not want to do this alone. Anyone who understands how Wikipedia works and would like to contribute is more then welcome to do so. We have started a new forum to keep track of our progress. Feel free to let us know what you’re working on.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, merchant services, merchant account, authorize.net, payment gateway, chargeback

Just like we did for Merchant Accounts, we’ve contributed to Wikipedia once again. Wikipedia now features an article for Authorize.net.

It was surprising that an article did not exist for them prior to this entry but while trying to create this article it became apparent why. We first submitted this article a few days ago and was writing a blog post about it when it got marked for “quick deletion”. They cited too much of the information matched the content on the Authorize.net website. That’s a fair enough reason to delete it so it was rewritten to not include any content from the Authorize.net website. It didn’t make a difference. Whomever deleted the article didn’t bother to check to see if the content was corrected (in Wikipedia you can provide notes for an article so editors can collaborate and discuss an article. The notes for this article clearly explained what happened but apparently the editor whom deleted the article didn’t read it or didn’t care).

Well, you can’t let one lazy person ruin it for everyone so we resubmitted the article with original content. It got marked for “quick deletion” again. This time it was cited as not showing that Authorize.net was a worthy enough company to warrant an article about it. So we did some research and found that if you can provide enough evidence, usually through media reports, then the listing can stay. So we added media reports showing the importance of Authorize.net (and we added a note of course). Didn’t matter. The editor deleted it instantly.

Fortunately we’re persistent here and were going to allow a couple of lazy editors to ruin a good thing. So, armed with more experience, we wrote the Authorize.net listing to include the media reports. It has been published and now the powers that be at Wikipedia seem to be happy with our submission. Naturally we’re going to keep an eye on it to make sure they don’t delete it from under our feet but if they haven’t marked it for deletion yet I feel pretty good about our chances.

In the future it would be good to have a time line of the company’s history listed. They have one on the Authorize.net website but we can’t use it as it copyrighted material. One day maybe we can go through their press releases and news stories to make our own time line.

SitePoint, the premier webmaster community on the Web, has agreed to publish its third merchant account related article written by Merchant Account Services. The article, which compares a true merchant account and gateway to third party providers, will be published on June 14th, 2023 . It includes a special calculator that allows readers to compare any true merchant account to the three largest third party providers. It is similar to the recently published True Merchant Account vs Third Party Comparison Calculator.

Previously featured articles include Put your Money where your Mouse Is: 6 Payment Gateways Reviewed and The Chargeback Challenge. Both were highly rated by SitePoint’s large reader base.