Where
do I start?
How do I change my password?
Help! I've lost my password!
My
browser can't bring up your transaction system. Is your system
down?
How do I use LinkSmart or ExpertLink with
my web site?
How can I see the transactions that have
been approved today? Yesterday?
Is it really real-time processing?
We want to automate - how do we get data
back from your system about our transactions?
I processed a transaction and it never
showed up in my batch. Where is it?
We know we processed transactions a couple
of days ago. Where's our money?
What is 'AVS' and how do I use it?
What kind of confirmations do we get
that a transaction went through?
How do I Void a transaction?
I ran a Pre-Authorization and it's not in
my Open Batch. Where'd it go?
How do I Void a Pre-Authorization from
my Pending Batch?
What is Duplicate Checking and how do
I use it?
We don't use Invoice Numbers. Why are
they important for credit card transactions?
My Internet hosting company has
a secure server. How do I use it?
Didn't
Get Your Question Answered?
General
Questions
How
much does it cost?
IntelliPay is among the lowest priced secure payment gateways
in the industry. Many of our clients come to us via resellers
as well as from direct sales by us. Value Added Resellers may
have different pricing from other VAR's as well as different
than IntelliPay's direct pricing. Also, our direct pricing varies
based on products purchased and volume of transactions. Please
contact us for direct pricing,
or speak with your IntelliPay representative through your IntelliPay
Reseller.
How
do I sign up?
Sign up is
handled by your IntelliPay
representative. You will need to complete an IntelliPay
account application and the IntelliPay Merchant Service Contract.
After we've received those documents and payment arrangements
have been made, we'll install your account on our system. This
is a very fast process. Back
to Top
Which
IntelliPay products or services should I sign up for?
In general, you will probably sign up for either LinkSmart or
ExpertLink. Both include Smart Terminal and other basic products
and services. To review those two choices go
here.
How
do I integrate IntelliPay into my web site?
If you are using a shopping cart, ecommerce portal or store
software that already supports IntelliPay v4 directly, you enable
your IntelliPay account through that product's interface.
If you are
using LinkSmart, or LinkSmart with SmartPages, for IntelliPay's
hosted secure payment pages, without using a middleware cart
or other product, you simply add some HTML to the web site page
that will transfer your shopper to our payment system. The instructions
for this method are contained in our LinkSmart documentation.
If you are
using ExpertLink to program IntelliPay's products and systems
into your web site business processes and will host your own
secure payment page and then talk "behind the scenes"
to IntelliPay's servers, then your web site developers will
build a small connector program that securely accesses IntelliPay
across the Internet. Instructions and tips for that connector
are contained in our ExpertLink documentation.
All of our
documentation is available here. Back
to Top
Do
I need a shopping cart?
Generally we advise that if you are selling more than two or
three products, or will have variable shipping costs per order,
or need to dynamically calculate and charge sales tax, then
you will need a shopping cart or similar product. It's possible
that if your sales will be simple with no dynamic calculations,
then you will not need a cart. You just "hard code"
the totals into the various web pages your customers will buy
from, and then you can easily integrate LinkSmart into those
pages.
There are
many types of carts with pricing running from free all the way
to thousands of dollars. There are cart programs you must host
on your web site and those that are hosted by the cart supplier.
Many excellent cart products exist in the $200 - $500 range.
For further
information about some carts and other ecommerce products that
already support IntelliPay, contact your IntelliPay
representative.
If you already
have a cart or store product and want it to support the IntelliPay
v4 payment functions, then contact the cart provider and ask
them to integrate IntelliPay v4 support into their system. They
can contact us through our web site and view the needed documentation
(ExpertLink) as well. Back
to Top
Will
IntelliPay work with my existing site and shopping cart?
Technically IntelliPay can work with any web site hosted anywhere.
For shopping cart compatibility see the previous
question. Back
to Top
Which
credit cards and debit cards does IntelliPay support?
IntelliPay supports Visa®, MasterCard®, American Express®,
Discover®, Diners Club® and JCB®. Also we support
the debit cards (check cards) of Visa and MasterCard. Additionally,
if you are set up to accept them through your merchant account
provider, we also support commercial cards (aka purchasing cards
and Level 2 purchasing cards.)
In all cases,
you must be set up to accept all card types through your merchant
account provider before IntelliPay can support you with those
card types. For instance, if you currently only accept Visa
and MasterCard and want to begin honoring American Express,
you will need to contact your merchant account provider to establish
that service, then contact IntelliPay to install specific card
support for your account. Back
to Top
Does
IntelliPay support multiple currencies?
At this time IntelliPay only supports U.S. dollars for merchant
accounts based in the U.S. Back
to Top
Does
IntelliPay work with merchants outside the U.S.?
Yes. If the merchant has a U.S.-based merchant account, we can
easily service them.
Back to Top
Do
you provide merchant accounts?
IntelliPay is not a merchant account provider. However, we have
relationships with many premier merchant account providers and
can refer you to one appropriate for your business needs. Not
all merchant accounts are equal. To read a brief, independent
report on merchant accounts, go
here. Contact your IntelliPay representative for referrals
to merchant account providers. Back
to Top
Will
my existing merchant account work with IntelliPay?
Most likely. However there are several things we'll have to
check when you call.
- Is the
account from a bank using one of IntelliPay's certified banking
networks?
- Is the
account set up for Internet transactions?
- Does
the provider know that IntelliPay will now be a terminal for
that account?
We can help
you find these things out when you contact us. It's not complex.
Back to Top
How
can I determine how you bill me for my monthly fees?
For details on how we collect our fees for your specific account
you would want to contact our billing department directly. Contact
information can be obtained here. Back
to Top
Do
you support bulk or recurring billing?
Yes. Merchants who collect bulk transaction requests or routinely
bill for periodic fees such as monthly dues, periodic subscription
fees, and others, can use our upload feature to send us a formatted
file of transactions that we will run for them. Details about
upload are available in our documentation here.
This is
an important feature for many businesses. Back
to Top
Do
you supply an online terminal for my phone orders?
Yes,
Smart Terminal is available for you to use. Simply log in to
your Secure Account Management System using any web browser
from anywhere. You can easily manually enter transaction requests
that you've received from phone or in-person sales. We've heard
of merchants that took their laptop to trade shows and connected
to their Internet provider using a cell phone, and processed
Smart Terminal transactions immediately. Back
to Top
Technical
and Operational Questions
Where
do I start?
After you're signed up and installed you can access all of IntelliPay's
features from our web site at www.intellipay.com.
From any page in the site you login to your Secure Account Management
System (SAMS) using the Merchant Login link near the top right
of the pages. Enter your login ID and password to enter the
SAMS. From SAMS you can access and use Smart Terminal, configure
various features related to LinkSmart or ExpertLink, duplicate
transaction system, e-mail receipts and more. You can also view
your Open Batch, past day's batches, the Pending Batch which
contains "Pre-Authorization Transactions" that authorized
but won't settle today unless you set them to do that.
You should
also review our documentation for the
IntelliPay products / services you signed up for. These documents
explain how to use the products, how to install the products
on your web site, and contain information appropriate for your
web developer or shopping cart providers if needed. Back
to Top
How
do I change my password?
Login to the Secure Account Management Systems (SAMS) and enter
the new password on your "Edit Configuration" page.
After changing the password, you must click the Submit button
at the bottom of the page for it to take effect.
When choosing
a password, we advise industry-standard rules: don't use birthdays,
your name, children's names, social security numbers or other
passwords that someone could repeatedly guess at and succeed.
The #1 security breach regarding computers and the Internet
is an "inside job" and is always local to your side.
Someone reading your garbage, log files, file folders, address
books or notes taped to your desk or computer can easily gain
access to your passwords stored these ways. Choose non-obvious
passwords you can remember. We recommend random strings of letters
and numbers.
And then,
change your passwords frequently.
Help!
I've lost my password!
If you lose your password you must contact
IntelliPay technical support for help in resetting your
password. For security purposes, our staff can't see your old
password and can only change it to a new one. Since anyone can
call and pretend to be you, you must have alternate information
available so we can confirm your identity on this call.
We will
not e-mail you your password under any circumstances - nor will
we ever call or e-mail you asking you to tell us your password.
Anyone asking you for your password is attempting
to breach your account. Do not tell them. Back
to Top
My
browser can't bring up your transaction system. Is your system
down?
Over time we have learned that because the Internet is a vast
collection of private networks hooked together, various parts
of the Internet go down for seconds or minutes each day. We
never know which portions go down as they are not under our
control.
Your segment
of the Internet controlled by your ISP or their partners may
have a net-split or have gone done for seconds or minutes. Or,
a connecting system between yours and ours may have been interrupted.
Or, your connection to your ISP is down or slow, or your computer's
Internet settings are inaccurate.
IntelliPay's
connection to the Internet is provided by a world-class provider
and we have multiple and redundant connections to many different
points of the Internet around the world.
Also, some
AOL users have experienced sporadic difficulties getting out
to various portions of the Internet
If you still
feel that IntelliPay's systems may be down, contact us immediately.
(NOTE: our site at www.intellipay.com is not housed in the same
data center that our production system is. If there is ever
any difficulty with one of those systems, the other is unaffected. Back
to Top
How
do I use LinkSmart or ExpertLink with my web site?
If you are using a shopping cart, ecommerce portal or store
software that already supports IntelliPay v4 directly, you enable
your IntelliPay account through that product's interface.
If you are
using LinkSmart, or LinkSmart with SmartPages, for IntelliPay's
hosted secure payment pages, without using a middleware cart
or other product, you simply add some HTML to the web site page
that will transfer your shopper to our payment system. The instructions
for this method are contained in our LinkSmart documentation.
If you are
using ExpertLink to program IntelliPay's products and systems
into your web site business processes and will host your own
secure payment page and then talk "behind the scenes"
to IntelliPay's servers, then your web site developers will
build a small connector program that securely accesses IntelliPay
across the Internet. Instructions and tips for that connector
are contained in our ExpertLink documentation.
All of our
documentation is available here. Back
to Top
How
can I see the transactions that have been approved today? Yesterday?
By logging into the Secure Account Management Systems (SAMS)
you can select "Credit Card Activity from the top menu,
then select "Review Open Batch" from the Credit Card
Activity menu. Back
to Top
Is
it really real-time processing?
Yes. When your site or Smart Terminal sends our system a transaction
request, we immediately send the authorization request to your
bank network to retrieve the approval and then answer back.
This process can take anywhere from half a second to 3-5 seconds.
Most of that lag is Internet lag between our production system
and your site. IntelliPay online processing is faster than a
manual credit card terminal device in your store since there
is "dial out" time, and the Internet and IntelliPay
are both many times faster than the 2400 baud modem most terminals
use.
Our connections
to the bank networks are through private, redundant, high-speed
connections to them. Back
to Top
We
want to automate - how do we get data back from your system
about our transactions?
IntelliPay, through LinkSmart or ExpertLink, provides several
methods of getting real-time, two-way communications with our
servers. Basically, you can get back real-time data about authorizations
through either LinkSmart, ExpertLink or by using the "Silent
Post" setting in Edit Configuration.
You will
have to have some programming on your side that receives one
of these data streams and reads it and then acts on the return
data the way you want it to.
Using these
data streams can be very powerful. You can integrate the data
into databases or other back-office systems in real time; you
can notify your fulfillment provider, allow access to online
content and much more.
Details
are available in our documentation. Back
to Top
I
processed a transaction and it never showed up in my batch.
Where is it?
If you don't see your transaction in the Open Batch, first,
check to see that you sent the transaction to us as a Normal
Auth from LinkSmart, ExpertLink or Smart Terminal. We have taken
many calls about this to discover that the merchant ran a transaction
in Smart Terminal but had "credit" checked or "Pre-Authorization"
checked. Credits will appear in the Open Batch, but Pre-Authorization's
will appear in the Pending Batch.
If you have
an authorization code, and you can't find the transaction in
today's Open Batch or a prior day's Closed Batch, or the Pending
Batch, then contact IntelliPay Support.
If you didn't
receive an authorization code, the next likely scenario is that
the transaction didn't reach us at all. This can happen for
several reasons such as Internet connection problems, broken
payment modules in your shopping cart or programming, or other
items.
Back to Top
We
know we processed transactions a couple of days ago. Where's
our money?
Generally, it takes 1 to 3 days for the money to arrive
in your checking account. The most common is 2 - 3 days.
Check your
Closed Batch for the day the transaction was processed in the
Secure Account Management System and count the days from that
date - ignoring Saturday and Sunday and any intervening holidays.
Also, if
the transaction was processed as a Pre-Authorization that transaction
is in the Pending Batch and will not settle until you mark it
to be settled. At the time you mark it, the day count begins.
Our settlement
process begins automatically every night at 8 p.m. PST. If the
transaction authorized after your daily batch was settled, then
it will settle the following night.
Back to Top
What
is 'AVS' and how do I use it?
The Address Verification System (AVS) is a system provided by
the card associations (Visa and MasterCard) to verify that the
bill-to address, including street address and zip code, as entered
by your shopper or yourself, matches those address components
on file with Visa or MasterCard from the cardholder's account
information.
AVS is a
basic element in fraud detection. While it by itself isn't really
adequate for detecting or preventing all types of card fraud,
it is useful in several ways. AVS is often used as one of the
"front lines" of defense against some card fraud attempts.
The AVS
system returns a score on every transaction submitted noting
whether the street address matched, the zip code matched or
other combinations (such as address matches but zip does not,
neither matches, it's a non-U.S. card therefore AVS isn't available
for use, and more).
IntelliPay
automatically includes an AVS request on every transaction sent
through our system on "card not present" (aka Mail
Order, Telephone Order) merchant accounts.
There are
some things to remember however;
- An authorization
will NOT be declined by the bank networks based on the AVS
score,
- AVS can
sometimes be wrong (Americans move and they may not have changed
their address with their card issuers),
- IntelliPay
provides several tools that allow you to control authorization
behavior based on AVS replies. One example: you can tell us
what AVS code you want to Approve and we'll automatically
decline all transactions that don't match your standard.
- If you
want or need to deal with AVS responses manually, you can
see the AVS scores for each transaction and decide what to
do to satisfy your own business needs.
See our
documentation about how IntelliPay helps
you automate and control AVS handlings. Back
to Top
What
kind of confirmations do we get that a transaction went through?
There are two possible customizable e-mail transaction receipts,
one to the customer and one to you. Also, in the live
data streams provided by IntelliPay, you will receive authorization
codes or decline messages (among others), that you can use to
control your web site's behavior, and/or stimulate other notifications
from your web site to you and/or others.
You control
the e-mail receipts in your Secure Account Management System. Back
to Top
How
do I Void a transaction?
Log in to the SAMS, under Credit Card Activity view the Open
Batch and mark the Void checkbox by the transaction you want
to cancel.
If the transaction
is in your Pending Batch you must first move it to the Open
Batch. Do this by checking the "Settle" box, which
will move it to the Open Batch, then, in the Open Batch, mark
it "Void".
NOTE: You
must void transactions prior to nightly settlement. If you fail
to void it prior to settlement, the transaction will settle
and you'll get the money, and the cardholder will lose that
available credit and increase their balance due. To return the
money after settlement you must run a Credit transaction to
refund the money. Back
to Top
I
ran a Pre-Authorization and it's not in my Open Batch. Where'd
it go?
A Pre-Authorization is stored in your Pending Batch and will
not settle until you go into the Pending Batch and mark that
transaction to settle.
How
do I Void a Pre-Authorization from my Pending Batch?
Go Here for this answer.
What
is the Duplicate Transaction System and how do I use it?
DTS is our powerful new addition to the IntelliPay payment system.
It lets you configure how it detects and responds to duplicate
transaction attempts.
Most bank
networks and merchant account providers do NOT provide duplicate
detection and handling. IntelliPay is the only payment gateway
providing real-time, configurable duplicate checking and handling
tools.
Duplicate
transaction attempts can be innocently sent to us by your customers
mistakenly submitting the same transaction twice (or more),
in which case you usually have to refund the money and pay merchant
account fees on both the duplicate transaction and the credit.
Also, it's known that some have used stolen cards to quickly
run a series of duplicate transactions for some reason, in which
case you may be affected by many charges and expensive fulfillment
that was unnecessarry.
If your
account is configured for the DTS, in your Secure Account Management
System you can configure how DTS works for you. Review
the DTS Docs. Back
to Top
We
don't use Invoice Numbers. Why are they important for credit
card transactions?
Card associations, notably Visa, require invoice numbers with
every authorization request. You can have IntelliPay automatically
generate invoice numbers and also enforce unique invoice numbers
for you and submit them with your auth requests. You do not
have to use the invoice numbers in your business systems, but
we'll fulfill the card industry's requirement for you.
If you do
use Invoice numbers there are several ways to send us your own
invoice numbers. See our documentation. Back
to Top
My
Internet hosting company has a secure server. How do I use it?
That secure server
will serve secure pages to your customer's browsers. If you
are collecting this data on your side for your uses then it's
valuable. You can use it to collect payment data and return
it to your programming that can then open a secure connection
to IntelliPay - but this connector must use SSL to talk to us.
Having a
secure payment page served by your own server has no intrinsic
value if you are using our Secure Payment Pages via LinkSmart.
Back
to Top of Page
