How does skypay work?:

An online payment gateway is the internet equivalent of a PDQ Swipe card Terminal. The good thing is that you don't need to be a technical guru to understand how payment processing works, this is demystified below; please contact us if you require additional information.

There are three main elements to each online transaction:

• A secure checkout page to collect your customer's card details.
  
• A payment gateway such as skypay to securely route the transaction details - and -
  
• An internet merchant account with a bank to accept the payment on your behalf.

skypay acts as an intermediary between your website and your merchant account provider
(i.e Lloyds, Natwest etc) and has been approved by most of the major banks as a secure payment gateway. An online transaction is normally processed within 3-8 seconds and goes through the following stages:

1. Your customer enters his or her name, address and payment information on your secure ordering page (i.e. the checkout page in your shopping cart system); the customer then clicks a button to submit the information and make payment.

2. The information is encrypted and sent securely to the skypay system. skypay then routes the details through the banking processing network and requests authorisation to 'capture funds' from the cardholder's account.

3. If the card is valid and sufficient funds are available in the buyer's account, the processing network returns an 'authorisation code' allowing the merchant to collect the transaction amount. The transaction details and authorisation code are securely stored and presented for 'settlement' at the end of each working day.

4. If the transaction is authorised, the money will be allocated to you from your customer's
account. If the transaction fails, we will report back a reason for the failure to your customer on your web page (for example, a common error is "ISSUE NUMBER NOT PROVIDED" for a Switch card when the card provider requires the issue number that is printed on the card). Successful transaction details show immediately within the administration system.

Using our standard facilities, you can opt to send an email to your customer to confirm receipt of their order and also opt to receive an email yourself whenever an order is placed successfully.

At the end of each day, we batch together all the transactions that happen during the day and send them through to your bank. It's that simple.

5. Your bank will then process the batch of transactions received, (by then, the money has already been allocated to you by the card issuer, and deducted from the cardholder's 'available balance'). When your bank has processed the transactions for the day, you will receive the payments into your bank account (normally within 48-72 hours).

Whether you are using a web development team or do everything yourself, we can assist with any aspect of implementing your secure ordering system.

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