We’re doing some e-commerce consulting for a non-profit organization.Their merchant bank informed them that Visa will soon be requiring all online vendors to verify transactions in real-time. Right now what our client does is securely accept credit card information online and store it in a text file, which a human then processes in a batch later on.
Visa’s stance makes sense, as they want to make sure their customers are receiving a certain level of service. But at the same time, this policy represents a huge cost for non-profit groups. They must invest in e-commerce software as well as pay additional transaction and verification fees. Seems like a nice compromise would be to give a discount to non-profit groups.