e-Commerce Glossary
Acquiring Bank - A bank having business relationship
with a merchant and receiving all credit card transactions from
that merchant, can also be called a merchant bank
Authorization - Credit card transaction approval for a
merchant by the Card-issuing bank.
Authorization Code - Code assigned by the card-issuing
bank to a credit card sale showing that the transaction is authorized.
BankCard - Credit card issued by a bank. Visa and MasterCard
are bankcards. American Express and Discover are not issued by
a bank.
Card issuing bank - This bank provides the customer's
credit card. The merchant's Acquiring bank completes a credit
card transaction with this bank.
Charge-back - Credit card transaction billed back to the
merchant who made the sale. Charge-backs occur when a credit cardholder
disputes a charge on their bill by claiming the product was never
delivered or the cardholder was dissatisfied with it in some way
or their card had been used fraudulently.
Check processing software - Software program enabling
a merchant to process a check (cheque) online. The customer completes
the check at the merchant web site and the check is manually banked
into the merchant's bank account.
Digital cash - Electronic cash residing in an electronic
wallet or purse. The transfers from a credit card or bank account
can fill up wallet or purse. When the customer uses digital cash
their funds go into the merchants wallet.
Digital certificate - Virtual fingerprints authenticating
the identity of a person or thing absolutely. The certificate
itself is simply a collection of information to which a digital
signature is attached.
Digital certificate authority (CA) - A business with authority
to issue digital certificates, public & private RSA cryptography
keys.
Digital server ID - Certification issued to a business
enabling it to process SSL transactions.
Digital signature - Piece of data sent with an encoded
message to uniquely identify the originator and verify the message
has not been altered after sending.
E-commerce - Generic term used to describe many different
facets of electronic commerce.
Encryption - Coding placed on messages sent across the
Internet. The coding scrambles the message making it difficult
to be attacked by hackers. SSL has built in encryption to code
the messages that can only be unscrambled by a server with a digital
server ID.
Internet payment provider - A business providing merchant
account establishment and transaction processing services. It
may also provide e-commerce software and handle such things as
digital delivery.
Merchant discount - Percentage of the retail sale the
merchant pays as a fee to the acquiring bank for processing the
credit card transaction.
Public and private key cryptography - Public-key cryptography
uses a pair of related keys--a public key, which is freely distributed
and can be seen by all users; and a corresponding unique private
key, which is kept secret and not shared among users. Thereby
ensuring privacy and verifying the identity of the sender.
Real time transaction - An Internet payment transaction
that is checked and validated online immediately after the customer
completes the order form. Validation usually occurs in approximately
15 seconds. Various validation routines are included in the transaction
processing depending on payment system design, fraud controls
and the audit test provided by your Internet transaction processor
and merchant bank.
SET - Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) is a complete
protocol and infrastructure specification for supporting credit
card payments over the Internet..
Shopping cart - Software that facilitates easy selection
and payment for multiple products purchased by a customer from
a merchants web site
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