Credit Card Processing FAQ’s

There is a difference between authorization and settlement. Authorizations take place in real-time (meaning 3-5 seconds for approval or decline). Settlements for credit cards are deposited into your account(s) within 24-48 hours.

A discount rate is a bank charge on merchant accounts. It is the fee that the banks and credit card companies charge merchants.  Discount rates typically vary between 1.5% to 6%.  However, be careful when evaluating this fee alone as a factor for determining fees paid to a bank or merchant service provider.  Many times, a flat rate per transaction fee and additional monthly fees are involved as well.

Chargebacks are when a customer contests a purchase made and charges the purchase back to the merchant. At this point the customer and merchant bank must review the case, and determine the customer’s claim that the purchase did not take place.

In actuality, the banks do. Our role is to securely transport the credit card information to the banking network and payment processing gateways for authorization and then return it to the customer and merchant.

Real-time processing is a method by which transactions are approved “on the spot”. Customers receive an approval or decline message within 3-5 seconds.

Yes.  Some companies prefer to open up separate merchant accounts for different locations in order for the monies to be settled into different commercial bank accounts.  Intellicharge allows one unique merchant account per location, and an ability to override the account for a particular station.

Intellicharge encrypts all credit card and electronic check  information for transport using the widely accepted TLS technology.

Each transaction that is processed through the Intellicharge interface returns a unique Gateway transaction Id.  This Id is internally recorded and serves as reference to the original invoice transaction.  Intellicharge seamlessly handles all of the communication with the payment processing gateway for properly refunding partial or entire transactions using this Id.  Bottom line, the entire process of reversing an invoice is completely transparent to your employees.

Intellicharge transactions average around 3 seconds for authorization.   This is typically much faster than your traditional pos terminals.

Intellicharge transactions average around 3 seconds for authorization.   This is typically much faster than your traditional pos terminals.

Automatically included with the Intellicharge interface is basic fraud screening tools including AVS (address verification system), Visa’s CVV2 and  MasterCard’s CVC 2.   In addition, Intellicharge supports EMV chip card readers, for added security on card present transactions.