Merchant Account Directory

Acquiring Bank
A financial institution that provides merchant accounts. A merchant account allows you to accept credit cards.

Internet Merchant Accounts
A bank account that allows you to accept card payments via the Internet. Unlike a traditional merchant account, an Internet merchant account does not require a shopper's signature, but has requirements beyond a typical MOTO (mail-order/telephone order account).
If you already have a merchant account, you should contact your acquiring bank and verify if the account supports credit card payment over the Internet. Different rates and regulations apply to Internet merchant accounts.

Processing Gateway
The gateway will automatically collect information and pass it to your acquring bank. The processing gateway allows for automated real-time processing. Examples of processing gateways are Cybercash and Authorize.NET.

Card Holder
The owner the of purchasing credit card is referred to as Card Holder.

Authorization & Settlement
Authorization is the processing of checking for available credit in the card holder's credit card account. A positive authorization reduces the cardholders available credit and reservces the funds for settlement. Settlement actually deducts the funds from the card holder's account.

Address Verification System
Address Verification System will compare the cardholders billing address with the entered billing address. AVS compares the zip code and street number.

Chargebacks
A chargeback is a request by the cardholder or the card-issuer to reverse a disputed purchase. Your acquiring bank may charge hefty fees for each chargeback.

Discount Rate
The small percentage of each transaction an acquiring bank charges you for the right to use your merchant account

Integrated Fraud Management
The process of checking card validity by comparing it to previous purchases, AVS report, internal decline database and fraudulent shopper behavior patterns.

Decline Database
A private database containing declined credit card numbers, fraudulent credit card numbers, stolen credit card numbers and previous charge-back credit card numbers. Once a credit card number has been placed within our decline database it can never be used with any Instabill and zStar Network merchant.