Payment and Credit Card Options

To a certain extent, the payment options your company offers will be controlled by your merchant service provider. Creative Cart allows you to accept the following payment methods:

  • VISA
  • MasterCard
  • Discover (Novus)
  • American Express (Amex)
  • C.O.D.
  • Online Check*
  • Mail Order**
  • PayPal***

For credit card payments, vendors can choose to not use VCode, allow the optional use of VCode, or require a VCode from their customers. Using VCode can help ward off fraud and decrease your credit card processing fees. What is VCode?

*Online Check - From the customer's order, Creative Cart can provide the account number, routing number, etc. The merchant can use this information to print checks to deposit in their account using check printing software, or the merchant can use this information to do a direct withdrawl from the customer's bank account. Creative Cart does not currently do the direct checking account withdrawls, although we do plan to add this feature in the future.

**Mail Order - This means that the customer will mail or fax in a printed copy of the order after the sale is complete. This is a completely off line, old fashion way of ordering items like ordering out of mail order magazines. After ordering, the customer will have to print out the order, send it to the vendor, and also send the payment. Merchants should use this option with extreme caution. Merchants are charged for every order placed with this method as if the payment was received, even though the merchant will most likely not receive payments for most of the orders placed using this method. This is a real sale-killing payment option because most customers will never send the payment in later; we highly recommend merchants not use this method. Even so, Creative Cart provides this option for the small minority of vendors whose typical high risk customers do not have bank accounts or credit cards.

***PayPal - Creative Cart offers a limited implementation of PayPal. Creative Cart gathers the customer's PayPal e-mail account name and provides it to the vendor, who must contact the customer to get paid through PayPal. We wanted Creative Cart to fully integrate with PayPal, but they were unwilling to cooperate with us. Although not as convenient, this method does work quite well, especially for vendors who do not have merchant accounts.

Offline Credit Card Processing

By default, Creative Cart securely provides merchants with the credit card numbers for their orders. To get paid, the vendor can type these numbers into their current payment terminal or copy and paste the numbers to an online program. Using the payment terminal or online software works very well for start up and smaller vendors with less than about 30 sales per day. However, when a vendor starts having more than 30 sales or so per day, typing in the numbers may become cumbersome. At somewhere around 30 sales per day, it becomes financially attractive to connect your shopping cart account to your merchant/bank account and use online credit card processing.

Online Credit Card Processing

Online credit card processing is convenient, fast, and a great way to prevent fraud. Online credit card processing requires a third party gateway account to connect Creative Cart to your merchant account. Most good merchant service providers provide a free online payment gateway account with their merchant accounts. With online credit card processing, Creative Cart sends the credit card information to the bank using the gateway and the bank decides if the card is to be accepted before Creative Cart completes the order. The credit card is checked for:

  • Valid Card
  • Card Stolen
  • Available Balance
  • Name on Card
  • Address Match
  • VCode Match

If the card is not accepted, Creative Cart will display the message from the credit card company explaining why the card was declined. Creative Cart then gives the customer the option to fix the problem or to enter another credit card number.

If the card is accepted, the order amount is reserved for your company and is no longer available as credit on the customer's account. When you ship the order, you simply tell Creative Cart to settle the order (or orders - it can be done in batch mode), and the money that was reserved for your company is transferred to your bank account. If you need to modify the amount of the amount before settlement, you can do that. You can void orders as well and Creative Cart will not charge you for orders that were voided.

As a bonus, vendors who use Creative Cart's online credit card processing also get a free terminal. Although most businesses will want to continue using their card swipe terminals, Creative Cart's built in terminal can be a nice backup in case your swipe terminal goes down. And if a business does not have a swipe terminal or software, then the Creative Cart terminal can be a handy way to process credit cards without purchasing extra software or hardware.

Online credit card processing is a flexible, powerful, time saving addition to Creative Cart. Minor extra charges will be applied for online credit card processing. See the Pricing page for details.