TrustCommerce Blog

Some things are worth the wait! We are happy to post that the latest and greatest TrustCommerce Developer's Guide 4.0 is now available for download within the TC Vault in PDF format. This new version comes with many improvements and several new chapters and sections. This document began as a revision to the existing TCLink Developer's Guide, but evolved into a more comprehensive TrustCommerce Developer's Guide.

As a replacement to the TCLink Developer's Guide, the new TrustCommerce Developer's Guide:

• Begins with the TCLink API as the fundamental interface for TrustCommerce payment processing
• Builds on that base to cover basic and advanced transaction processing
• Ties in additional TrustCommerce services, such as TC Citadel and TC CrediGuard
• Includes alternative processing interfaces, such as TC Batch, HTTPS/POST and TC Trustee Merchant Host.

We hope you find this to be a valuable resource. To submit feedback or make requests for future versions, click here.

On my morning commute, lost in thought, I drove right past the office. Snapping out of it, I realized what I’d done, took a right turn and began my detour back to the office.  Having never gone this route, I saw buildings and roads I’d never seen before, discovering better paths for future trips.

Seeing things in a new light makes me think about the TrustCommerce professional services team. What I love about our team is how they look at a project from every angle – upside down, backwards, and sideways before arriving at a clear plan for reaching an objective. Our team has lead projects and implementations for leading organizations in key vertical markets and apply that unique knowledge to every project.

Merchants come to our team with an action plan, and 9 times out of 10, TrustCommerce project managers find a clearer path to the merchant’s ultimate destination. They help the merchant better understand their objectives and the payment environment, thereby, streamlining the project and providing a cost-effective solution.

The team’s 4-phase methodology may be standard; the team is anything but.
Phase I: Concept – Technical Design and Discovery
Phase II: Development – Development, error handling
Phase III: Integration & Acceptance Testing – Testing and UAT
Phase IV: Production & Maintenance – Production Validation, confirmation

It never hurts to explore your surroundings, see things in a new light, and let that new awareness lead to better direction. Our project management team applies this lesson daily!

Sure, it’s only August, but if you are an e-tailer, you are already thinking about the holiday season. Here are 5 top payment processing tips to reduce fraud and prevent chargebacks. Make the most of the holiday rush by being prepared!

1. Manually verify the order — While it sounds time consuming, sometimes your best bet is a little human interaction. If in doubt:

• Call or email the customer to make sure the order is legitimate.
• Reverse look up the phone number and check that the phone number matches the ZIP code area. Mismatched phone numbers and ZIP codes typically create higher fraud rates.
• Look for different bill-to and ship-to addresses.
• A foreign credit card shipping locally often is a warning sign for fraud.
• Shipping to a temporary address, such as hotel or PO Box can be an indicator. A quick phone call can prevent a chargeback.

2. Check IP — If your system can check where IP address are from, you will be able to identify anomalies such as a billing/shipping address in one country, and the IP address locator indicating the IP address used was from another country. This can trigger the merchant to evaluate the purchase and take anti-fraud measures.

3. AVS Match — Using AVS is a must. Merchants can set up AVS to accept or reject orders based on certain criteria. Your system should allow customers to enter both billing and shipping addresses. It is critical that the billing address matches the customer’s credit card information. If it doesn't match, the credit card company will automatically side with the customer in a chargeback. Enable your AVS to reject orders that don't match the billing address and ZIP code.

4. CVV2 Match — It is against Visa/MasterCard regulations to store the CVV2 number. By verifying it, it helps assure that the person placing an order physically had possession of the credit card that was used.

5. Create a block list — Many payment processing solutions allow you to create a “block” list. For example, you may block countries or IP addresses that are typical sources of online fraud. You might hesitate to block a large segment of perceived potential customers, but smart choices can reduce fraud. Consider your industry, customer base, buying behavior, and other unique business characteristics when creating your block list.

TC CrediGuard
U.S. merchants incurred losses of over $150 billion resulting from stolen merchandise; identify theft, and lost interest and fees associated with chargebacks, according to a LexisNexis Risk Solutions report.
TC CrediGuard can be merchant’s fraud protection partner. It is sophisticated fraud detection and scoring software featuring a Web-based management console. Monitor 24x7 by activating different checks to aid in fraud prevention specific to your unique environment and industry.

Velocity Controls allow the merchant to determine when an account behavior is excessive or abnormal. Options include:

• Global: restricts the total number or dollar value of transactions
• ZIP code: restricts the total number or dollar value of transactions submitted from a certain ZIP code
• IP Address: restricts the total number or dollar value of transactions submitted from any one IP
• Credit Card: restricts the total number or dollar value of transactions submitted from any one credit card

Merchants can create a Black List rule to indicate the value to be blocked. Transactions that match a Black List rule are not processed and are reported as Declined/Blacklist.

• Name    
• Address
• State    
• ZIP code
• Phone   
• Country
• Email  
• IP address
• Full credit card number

Use TC CrediGuard in conjunction with AVS and CVV checking for powerful results. To learn more, call 800.915.1680 and speak with a solutions consultant.

It’s the start of a New Year and, naturally, businesses begin prioritizing projects.  “What can we accomplish this year? What projects can we take on that will deliver the most bang for the buck.” Each division jockeys for position and vies for scarce time and resources.

The single most important business decision merchants can make this year centers on data security. All the hard work your teams put in every day is rendered useless in the event of a data breach. Progress stops and all attention shifts toward survival.

How are you securing your data? Better yet, where is it?
When evaluating whether you are confident in your data security strategy, begin by looking at where your data resides. Start scratching the surface and you might find private cardholder information in unusual places, such as marketing and even human resources. Merchants can greatly reduce exposure and expenses by eliminating the data from their environment and rely on a third-party vendor to secure the information. This becomes a strong foundation for protecting their brand and reputation.

TC SMART Products® encrypt, secure, and warehouse your cardholder data using E2EE and tokenization.
Tokenization replaces sensitive cardholder information with unique identification symbols that retain the necessary information in a meaningless format to hackers. In a payment card transaction, a token typically consists of alphanumeric characters that represent cardholder data specific to the transaction in progress and contains only the last four digits of the card number. When an authorization request is made to verify the transaction, the card number is used only in the initial request. The token is returned to the requester instead of the card number along with approval or rejection of the transaction. The merchant can access the token for recurring payments but the credit-card number is stored in TrustCommerce’s PCI compliant data storage service.

In support of tokenization, Visa has released a paper discussing best practice recommendations. You may read the full document here: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/tokenization_best_practices.pdf

End-to-end Encryption refers to a complete protection of data that flows between two points in a network, in which the data is encrypted when it leaves its source, leaving it encrypted while it passes through any intermediate computers (such as routers), and decrypting only when the data arrives at the intended destination.

In a recent Aite Group report, “Card Fraud in the United States: The Case for Encryption,” they determined end to end encryption would have the greatest impact on reducing fraud. “We estimate that a national E2EE deployment would cut 90% of card-not-present and counterfeit cards in the United States.”

As the pioneer of these technologies since 2001, TrustCommerce payment processing solutions are proud to have led the way in innovation by leveraging tokenization and E2EE.  TrustCommerce created the security needed for the industry, before most addressed such concerns. This powerful combination, in conjunction with other secure technologies, allows merchants to defer much of the cost, risk, and threat, involved in handling sensitive cardholder information. Our leading solutions include:

TC POS Vault uses industry proven key injection management and encryption technologies to quickly and safely process transactions from the customer swipe. This solution also mitigates card-not-present browser cache vulnerabilities.

TC Citadel is a powerful e-billing application designed for recurring, installment, subscription and utility payments. TC Citadel securely stores cardholder payment information and privacy data within the TrustCommerce data storage service. Merchants exchange credit card numbers and other privacy data elements for TrustCommerce issued Billing IDs.

Affordable and easy to integrate secure solutions
You may perceive that implementing a data security solution is expensive and as resource intensive as maintaining PCI compliance. Fortunately, making a large stride toward stronger data security can be done rather easily (and lessen your PCI compliance burden). TrustCommerce payment processing solutions leverage these powerful technologies and can be implemented quickly. The TrustCommerce professional services team can also develop custom integrations for merchants with unique environments or needs.

So, as you tackle your business’s “To-Do” list this year, place data security at the top. Then, feel that sense of accomplishment when you can quickly mark it complete.