Access-Based Sales
Many ClearCard clients sell access to restricted areas of their web sites. Their customers purchase the right to enter those restricted areas for a certain period of time. Customers enter the restricted areas by providing specific URL locations and, usually, a valid username and password.

ACH Authorization
Automated Clearinghouse Authorization. Similar to a wire transfer, this banking technology is used to automatically deduct from and/or credit money to specific bank accounts.

Authorization/Verification
Like any other online or offline retailer accepting credit cards as a form of payment, ClearCard consults the credit card authorization/verification network prior to completing the sale. This network first verifies that the credit card number and supporting data are valid, checks that there is sufficient credit in the account, then authorizes the dollar amount of the requested charge.

What does AVS mean?
AVS stands for Address Verification System. An AVS check is a comparison of an address with the billing address for a creditcard. By rejecting transactions that fail AVS, you help reduce your exposure to fraud.

Charge back
The reverse of a charge. A customer who regrets having made a purchase may ask his/her bank to undo the credit card charge. When the charge involves the delivery of a tangible product, banks tend to favor the seller. When the charge involves an intangible such as web site access, banks tend to favor the reticent buyer. Customers who get out of their purchases in this manner are added to ClearCard's fraud database so that future purchase attempts will be turned away.

Client
From ClearCard's point of view, a client is any vendor who sells access to his/her web site, or a service or a product, through ClearCard. A customer is any person who buys that access, service or product from ClearCard, then goes to the client to claim what he/she just bought.

Client Reserve
Standard credit card industry billing procedure in which a percentage of the sale amount is retained by the payment processing company to protect itself from catastrophic losses. It's expected that there will always be a certain percentage of charge backs (refunds of charges, whether the customer requests it through you or simply forces it through his/her bank). Because these charge backs come against ClearCard, the banks expect ClearCard to pay back the disputed amounts.

Credit cards are most often used to carry debts over many months. Challenges may occur long after the original charge was applied. It would be unreasonable for ClearCard to hold back all of its clients' wholesale credit card revenue for half a year, but ClearCard has to have some way to protect itself against catastrophe (the abrupt disappearance of a web site and its proprietor, mainly). Keep in mind, ClearCard has very little knowledge of its clients apart from faxed contracts with signatures. As a compromise, ClearCard issues client wholesale checks for credit card revenue at a set time after each billing cycle. These checks deliver the lion's share of wholesale revenue to each client, but not quite all of it. A negotiated percentage of the original retail amount is held back for six months as an emergency reserve.

Client Username/Password
ClearCard provides near-real-time reports on your account's transactions and payment statements through the Merchant Area. In this section, you can also submit refund requests and many other business functions. To access the Merchant Area, you must first log in using your client username and password.

Country Mismatch
When a customer signs up for service they tell us what country they're from in three different ways. 1) They tell us their country. (Usually from a pull-down list of countries.) 2) Their IP address is within a range allocated to a country. 3) Their credit card is issued by a bank in a country. These three methods of obtaining the country data do not always agree. When they differ, the likelihood that the transaction is fraudulent is higher. For the greatest level of security, deny these transactions.

CPI
ClearCard Payment Interface (CPI) is a simple and scalable commerce system and the core of ClearCard’s offering. The two main components of the system are: The ClearCard Payment Interface (CPI) and the ClearCard API. Both of these implementations ride on top of the same basic payment processing application.

CPNI
ClearCard’s Payment Notification Interface (CPNI) allows you to integrate ClearCard payments with your website commerce functionality. This part of CPI will allow you to receive immediate notification and confirmation of payments you receive from customers. The benefit to you is the ability to: Store transaction information in your own database. Automate your fulfillment operations (e.g. Sending shipping info to your warehouse) For CRM functionality you can track your customers through the notification’s pass through variables capability. Customize your websites response to customer purchases in real time

Customer
From ClearCard's point of view, a customer is any person who buys access, service or a product from ClearCard, then goes to a client to claim what he/she just bought. A client is any vendor who sells access to his/her web site, or a service or a product, through ClearCard.

CVV2
CVV2 stands for Card Verification Value. It is a new authentication scheme established by credit card companies to further efforts towards reducing fraud for internet transactions. It consists of requiring a card holder to enter the CVV2 number in at transaction time to verify that the card is on hand.

CVC
CVC stands for Card Validation Code. It is essentially synonymous with CVV2. Specifically, MasterCard uses the term CVC, Visa (and most other cards) use CVV2.

Glossary | Continued