Hello and welcome to IntelliPay. Your integration of IntelliPay's payment processing system can be easily accomplished using standard tools and languages. You'll find that our various unique and powerful features allow you to bring powerful transaction-level controls to your real-time payment processes giving your business or client outstanding control over their real-time payment income.

Which IntelliPay features you choose to integrate will be determined by your business model and merchant-side needs. You can choose the simplest of integrations or add various IntelliPay features bringing more robust capabilities to bear. This document will highlight some of the more significant business decisions you need to make, as well as discuss various tips for integration. Also, in addition to our online documentation - which you should review in some detail - you can also contact our standard technical support for basic questions, or, if needed, we can provide access to an IntelliPay engineer for prearranged phone appointments to help resolve any issues you may have.

IntelliPay Product Overview

In developing an IntelliPay integration you will use either our LinkSmart™ product or our ExpertLink™ product. This will be the first decision you must make. The essential differences of these two products are:

LinkSmart: IntelliPay serves the secure payment pages for the merchant. We pre-fill the initial secure page with data your system sent us from your HTML form on your final shopping page. You do NOT need a secure server to use LinkSmart as we'll collect the credit card data and any other data required by the merchant in his customizable IntelliPay configuration (SAMS). The vast majority of small merchants use LinkSmart as it allows them to avoid expenses related to secure site certificates and other transaction-related security issues. However, using LinkSmart does not cover all the merchant's security considerations.

By default, LinkSmart serves our own generic payment pages. These pages are minimally customizable by sending us your logo which we'll include on the page. Also, you have basic control over header and footer text and page background colors. LinkSmart can be upgraded to use SmartPages™ which allows you to completely redesign our payment pages, and we serve those in place of ours.

ExpertLink: You serve your own secure transaction pages and send/receive secure payment transactions "in the background." You will need your own secure server and a program or "connector" to take the transaction data from your secure form, open an SSL socket to us over the Internet and send and receive transactions messages in HTTP.

Using ExpertLink, you can build very robust transaction handlings by taking advantage of the dynamic nature of our AVS Rules and our new Duplicate Transaction System. Also, ExpertLink users also have access to our BatchManagement product allowing remote control over previously authorized transactions.

Other Business Decisions

• Decide what data fields (HTML form fields) you want to collect and send IntelliPay based on the possible fields we accept (found in the LinkSmart or ExpertLink Docs/docs_access.htm).
• Configure the merchant's IntelliPay configuration in SAMS. You can set Required and Editable fields and more. If you don't send us fields required in SAMS, we will issue an error message. Our system also checks for basic edit errors in various field contents (an "@" in the email address, a properly formatted AMOUNT, properly formatted phone numbers, etc.)
• Also in SAMS, pay attention to settings related to the Duplicate Transaction System, the email transaction receipts we can automatically send, and other settings. SAMS settings will have a direct impact on any programming you build, and if you or your merchant later changes SAMS settings, it could affect your programming workability.
• ExpertLink has the natural return data stream in the SSL socket it uses. However, an additional live data stream is available to both LinkSmart and ExpertLink users - Silent Post. Do you want a second live response stream to feed another program or location?
• Using ExpertLink, you will have complete control over your user's experience. You will have to generate the secure payment page, any retry pages and secure receipts. You can do these dynamically, giving your customers a completely interactive experience, and when receiving an authorization response from us, you can move the customer to any portion of your site for downloads, etc. Retry pages are pages displayed when a customer's card has been declined or there was some error in the prior attempt and you offer them another payment page allowing them to retry with the same or another card.
• What will you do with the live data stream(s) we return? Aside from controlling your customer's online experience, you can use our live data stream(s) to achieve real-time updates to your shopping cart database, customer management systems, CRM systems, front office contact and/or sales management systems, update or notify fulfillment systems or other 3rd party partners, and more.
• Does your business require the use of Authorization Only transactions? This is where you authorize the transaction one day, but settle it later than "today" (usually within 7 days) after you've shipped or fulfilled the order. If so, then you can make use of our BatchManagement product described in our ExpertLink documentation.

Basic Programming Tips

After reviewing our product documentation you have probably noticed how easily IntelliPay can be integrated using languages and programming tools you are already familiar with.

In general, the program or "connector" you build to talk to ExpertLink will imitate a client-side browser and talk HTTPS to ExpertLink. The HTTP over SSL must arrive as a correctly formed POST with appropriate headers and content encoding. It must also be able to follow a redirect directive.

Coding SSL sockets is easier now since the OpenSSL code is available in several languages (www.openssl.org), and other platforms have native methods for opening secure sockets. Additionally, ExpertLink currently handles session management with a cookie in the header but you can safely ignore this header in your connector..

You can dynamically request that our replies arrive as a delimited list or as Name=Value pairs.

Also, we suggest that whatever system you are building include automated email transaction receipts sent to the buyer immediately on approval. You can use ours, or disable them and use your own. In any case, a transaction receipt in addition to the HTML receipt seems to reduce merchant chargebacks.

About Response Codes and Formats

If you are building an ExpertLink connection or are using Silent Post, request a current version of our Response Code documentation.

About Security

Merchant-side security issues have always been important and they are becoming increasingly important. Many ecommerce sites have paid a price for "fast and loose" handling of customer data as well as data requiring obvious security such as credit card numbers.

Whether you are using a commercial shopping cart or store product, or are building your own, you must be aware of and verify the handling of a variety of security and other risk-related issues.

Notably, if you are collecting the credit card numbers on your site, and maybe storing them as well, you or your store software should be encrypting the data prior to saving it. Also, the database holding the data should not be accessible from other entry points such as web servers. You should also consider whether your web site is protected by a robust firewall product complete with their latest updates. Likewise, passwords should exist for every individual and process that can access machines, databases and secure interfaces. Access should be on "need to know" basis, and password rotation should be forced.

As you know, there are many more security related issues and this document cannot define or address them adequately. However, it's worth noting the credit card associations Visa, MasterCard and others, as well as the merchant account providing banks, are increasingly aware of merchant-level security problems and issues. It's likely that these institutions may someday issue security advisories, guidelines or requirements for ebusiness Internet sites. So taking some precautions now not only makes good business sense, but may someday affect your merchant account.

IntelliPay's security is constantly monitored and our system architecture was built from the ground up with security issues in mind.

Many businesses use IntelliPay because they don't want to store sensitive financial data on their local machines.

For Multiple Merchant Integrations

Programmers or integrators building ecommerce systems that will support many merchants will have to send the correct IntelliPay loginID and LinkSmart Password for the merchant. Otherwise, the processes described here and in our other documentation are essentially identical.

However, you may want to make provisions for different merchant's business models as related to various IntelliPay features. Some merchants may not use our Duplicate Transaction System at all while others may. Some merchants may not use it in the beginning but may want it later. Others may use our AVS controls and others may not. Some may want specific day-to-day control over AVS settings by using an interface in your product or system to set rules you allow them to set, such as "if transaction amount is greater than $nn, reject AVS mismatches." (This illustrates a business rule you can build into your product using one of IntelliPay's features.)

The more of our features you support as options for your business customers, the more valuable you and your product will be to them. Done well, you become indispensable.

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Also see documentation about the Secure Account Management System, and other IntelliPay products from our Documents section.