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