If you want to know more and the latest on credit card offers, log on to cardconsumers.com, the most reliable guide for credit cards. Cardconsumers.com serves you the plentiful and the best information, tips and suggestions and much more on consumer cards.

If you want to to open an online store in order to sell out products and services, then the first and most basic thing you need is a payment gateway so that you can accept payments online. These days, many web sites run online shopping modules, with the support of various Payment Gateways which are available worldwide. Payment Gateways work as an intermediary between the customer and the merchant, and help them by making secure transactions.

A payment gateway is an e-commerce service provider that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, et cetera. Whenever a buyer or a consumer purchases a product from merchant that has a payment gateway, the payment gateway comes into action and performs certain tasks to process the transaction.

Payment Gateway creates an automatic payment deal between the customer and the merchant. It is usually a third-party service, which is actually a system designed to process, verify, and accept or decline credit card transactions on behalf of the merchant through secured Internet connections. A payment gateway is a network that allows a merchant to accept credit cards and other forms of electronic payments. These payment gateways are extremely secure so that they can safely take care of whole transaction online. When referring to payment gateways used for Internet transactions, it may also be called an IP payment gateway.

In IVR, or Interactive Voice Response Service, the customer enters the credit card details on the phone, using an automated answering service. In the case of orders via web site, the browser encrypts the information, which then passes between the browser and the web server using SSL encryption. CyberSource, VeriSign, PayPal and Authorize.net are some of the popular payment gateway service providers allowing merchants to accept credit cards through their web sites over an Internet Protocol connection.

Discovered some fraudulent transaction on your monthly Credit Card statement? Use Chargeback to get Reversal of a Credit Card Transaction. There may be the cases when you find your Credit Card has been charged without your consent.

In case you are not satisfied with the quality of product or service then too you can make use of chargeback option available with all the Credit Card Companies. Theses types of transactions may include the situations where:-

•Card holder does not authorize the transaction.
•Transaction was processed more than once.
•Customer never received merchandise or services.
•Error in transaction amount.
•Incorrect amount processed in transaction.
•You receive a product differ from what was described or promised.
•Card Consumer is not satisfied with quality of product or service.

In case of chargeback Bank will investigate complaint and will take back the amount of original transaction from merchant’s account, unless the merchant can verify the transaction was genuine. Sometimes the complaint is not genuine and consumer’s claim gets denied, still in these cases merchant will be sometimes get charged processing fees.

Majority of the chargeback cases do happen due to technical problems between the merchant and the issuing bank. For example a consumer was charged twice for same transaction or other such mistakes like authorization process of a Credit Card where transaction is declined by the issuing Bank and the account is still charged.

A merchant is billed for the chargeback along with the fess and the settlements associated with the credit card transaction. A chargeback may be appealed by the merchant and if chargeback is found to be untrue then merchant will get a reversal. Dishonest consumers normally abuse the chargeback system by making a purchase over Internet with Credit Card and then issuing a chargeback on receiving the product or service leading to difficulty in recovering payment for merchants.

In the end, chargeback can be considered as safeguard against your Credit Card Transaction. As a Credit Card consumer one must have knowledge about all its technical details like rate of interest, annual fees and specially the things like chargeback.
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Credit Card has become part of our day to day life, with so many benefits it has, it’s not easy to avoid purchasing on it and avoid Credit Card Debt. But there may be various alternatives to avoid Debt. These Steps explained in detail below could be so useful that if followed with proper guidelines and directions can surely lower your Debt. It’s nearly obvious that if you are an American then you must own a credit card and if you own a credit card then you have almost certainly got more than one card and if you own credit cards, there’s a great possibility that you owe a balance.

Here are ten steps to promptly minimize your total credit-card-debt:

1. Calculate the total debt you owe so that you can devise a plan accordingly.

2. Order your cards as per descending interest rates, with higher rate of interest card first.

3. By this time you better know which one of the cards has higher interest rate in comparison to the others! So start calling the Credit Card Company & ask them to lower the interest rates, this may sound comical but these things do work and if they refuse request made by you, contact the supervisor and plea again.

4. Rearrange your priority list in the similar downward order.

5. Check if there are any particular interest rates or promotional offers that might expire shortly. If you own a card with interest rate at 0% then it would be at the least rank in your priority list, but if changes occur in it after a month, it might get to the uppermost on the list pretty soon.

6. Now, prepare a second list – write down total balance you have on each and every card. Order this in descending manners as well.

7. Finally a third list. This process involves a little mathematics. Get the total balance from each card and divide the sum by total credit limit on the card. This gives you “debt-to-limit” percentage. This list will also be in descending order.

8. By this time, three lists are with you. Each one of the lists will probably be dissimilarly ordered. This step needs your decision that what is your most important objective to 1) get rid of debt as soon as possible, 2) pay as minute interest as feasible, or 3) improve your credit score?

9. If you desire for getting rid of the debt sooner then you should pay bare minimum balances on each and every card but the top ones from each of the first two lists (apparently while averting any new purchase on your card). If you wish to pay as least interest as possible then pay as much as feasible from the topmost card at the first list. If you want credit improvement then pay off the cards according to the order of the third list.

10. Maintain it! If you don’t accumulate new debt, and keep on paying down your cards according to the order of the lists we suggested, you’ll be surprised how speedy you can get rid of the credit card “monkeys” off your shoulders.

Finally, credit is not a bad obsession, but you need to be watchful when you are looking at getting a new credit card. Do a comparison among the variety of Credit Cards available.

These interesting facts about Credit Card can make you go Hmmmm… it covers a number of useful consumer information that may one day come in handy in your daily life.

• Wonder why minimum payments are so low? It allows consumer to carry more debt while keeping to the same low minimum payment. You can give someone with the ability to pay $100 per month a credit limit as high as $5,000 if they only had to pay 2% a month. If the minimum payment were 5%, they could only have a credit limit of $2,000. The lower the minimum payment, the deeper in debt someone could be in.
• In United States, there are over 1.52 Billion Credit Cards in use.
• In the beginning, credit cards were just charge accounts, offered by individual stores and only usable at those stores. The first credit card that could be used at multiple locations was offered by The Diner’s Club in 1950
• Late library fines and unpaid parking tickets can hurt your credit score.
• At least one in 10 consumers has more than 10 credit cards in their wallets. That’s equal to 304 tons of plastic or 61 Elephants.
• You can lower your interest rate with a phone call. Credit card companies are like cell phone and cable companies, they’re afraid you’ll leave and join with one of their competitors. Use this to your advantage by comparing offers from other credit cards and bringing this information to your credit company.
• All though the first credit cards were merchant specific cards starting in 1900 with several hotels, the first true credit card was invented in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank X. McNamara. The Diners Club charged participating restaurants 7% interest on each purchase and charged a $3 fee a year to the card holder. This was the first card that could be used at different locations. Chase and Bank of America (Visa) came out with their first credit cards in 1958. They became most popular when the magnetic strip became available in 1970.
• A fixed interest rate on a credit card can change with only 15 days of notice. Fixed is not fixed in the sense that a mortgage loan is fixed, it’s fixed in the sense that the credit card company can change it with only 15 days notice.
• There is no federal law regulating the rate of interest a credit card company can charge! The federal government use to regulate but repealed those laws during the Great Depression and never put them back in place, they now rely on the states to handle usury.

Albert Einstein was once asked what he felt was mankind’s greatest invention….His answer…“compound interest”…..

One can also apply for Credit Cards online and there is good number of websites to help you out in choosing a best Credit Card for you. These websites do have ratings, reviews and comparison of Credit Cards in easy to understand language. These sites do provide the facility to apply for Credit Card Online too and applying on these sites is free too.

Visit Us our Credit Card Ratings section for more such tips about Credit Card.

Did you ever think about how your Credit Card works, how a piece of thin plastic makes you able to purchase big costly things and services without any worries of carrying cash and that too at so much of convenience. It means a lot to a great number of people around the globe. Majority of United States Citizens have at least one credit card and usually more than four or five.

These cards also work as your source of Identification, for example if you want to rent a car then you do require a major credit card. Used intelligently this card can give ease, comfort and allows you to make purchases with almost a month to pay for them prior to finance charges put the boot in. This sounds excellent but in reality many card consumers don’t take this benefit as they do carry a balance from month to month and some times even from year to year. Carrying a balance on your credit card may cost you a whooping 24 percent of charge. Most of the people find it very hard to resist themselves from using this piece of plastic.

We will discuss History and technical things behind a Credit Card. Starting from the scratch a credit card is thin piece of plastic, typically 3-1/8 inches by 2-1/8 inches in size, which contains ID information like a signature or photo, and authorizes the individual printed on it to charge for purchase or services to his account. Today, the information on the card can be read and used on ATMs, store readers and Internet. Users pay out their bills on a monthly or yearly basis plus the annual fees. The earliest Credit Card that could be used on variety of stores and businesses was introduced by Diners Club in 1950 and after eight years American Express came with its universal credit card called “Don’t Leave Home without it!” and then came the Bank of America in 1959 which was renamed as Visa later on. Master Card followed them with the name of Master Charge earlier.

Now the Credit Card Number system, although the associated cards like departmental card have their own numbering system but ANSI standard is used by most of the national card systems. A total of 16 digits are there on front of Cards. The first digit in Credit Card Number signifies the system:

3 – American Express and Diners Cub

4 – Visa

5 – Master Card

6 – Discover Card

Usually, digits from two to six stands for Bank Number, digits from seven to fourteen stands for Account Number and last digit is a check digit. This system varies from bank to bank.

When a purchase is completed, the credit card consumer agrees to pay the card issuer. The cardholder indicates his/her approval to pay, by signing a receipt with a record of the card details and signifying the amount to be paid or by entering a Personal identification number (PIN). Also, many merchants now accept verbal authorizations via telephone and electronic authorization using the Internet, known as a ‘Card/Cardholder Not Present’ (CNP) transaction.

Electronic authentication systems allow merchants to confirm that the card is valid and the credit card customer has enough credit to cover the purchase, allowing the verification to happen at time of purchase. The authentication is performed using a credit card payment terminal or Point of Sale (POS) system with a communications link to the merchant’s acquiring bank. Data from the card is obtained from a magnetic stripe or chip on the card.