an answer for dealing with international credit cards

found out what service a huge site uses!

[amznVibe]

With the recent talk about making it easier for international customers
to pay for items/services on a web site (particularly to the USA)
(originally in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] )
I really got curious to find out what the big sites were using to
allow international credit cards.

Then I remembered I have a friend who is a manager for a rather huge
satalite company's customer service center. (not just the dishes,
they actually own and operate satalites too :) )

They take credit cards, and in some cases checks, from overseas all the time!
She gave me an awesome insight into how they do it. Here's how:

They use a credit card merchant system where they can override AVS (address matching)
if necessary, and then they use this company to minimize the risk of fraud:

[authorizenet.com...]

Very interesting company, and check out that clean but striking website!

kinda unrealated but very snazzy: [authorizenet.com...]

(I also found out what merchant front end system they use so if anyone is truly interested just stickymail me)

[Crazy_Fool]

they're not doing anything special or unusual - they're just using one of the many online payment gateways. no need for bank merchant accounts, cards are processed online in real time. saves time, saves hassle, more secure than collecting details with your own SSL pages and storing them on your server.

quick and easy to set up. higher transaction charges than with a bank merchant account but the time saving means big companies require fewer staff and smaller companies can get on with promoting their sites instead of manually checking and processing transactions.

many payment gateways like authorize.net and worldpay allow you to block transactions from certain IP addresses or IP ranges, or from specific email addresses or domains (ie, hotmail) and so on.

have a read back through old threads here to find more about online payment processing companies. some names you'll see are:
worldpay
netbanx
ibill
ccnow
ccpay
authorize.net
2checkout.com
plenty of others .......

[Namaste]

there is no such thing as country restriction by Master/Visa...whoever posted that originally is out of his/her league. Once you accept Master/Visa/Amex, you can accept any Master/Visa/Amex issued anywhere in the world.
There is no such thing that a US merchant cannot accept Master Visa issued outside the US.