Virtual Merchant is a payment gateway allowing merchants to submit transactions via the Internet to Elavon’s network and have them authorized in real-time. This guide is designed to help you, the developer, write a Website that will interface with Virtual Merchant to process these transactions.
Virtual Merchant accepts information sent via HTTPS, either by a Get (along with the Query string in the URL) or Post (typically from an HTML Form) Method. The information you send, along with your Virtual Merchant settings, will determine how your transactions are handled. This information will determine user interface settings such as colors, images to display, field order, and field selection. This information also will determine behavior. For example, if Virtual Merchant needs to display a form to collect additional customer information, the information you send and your Virtual Merchant settings will determine the type of receipt to display to the customer, and how information is sent back to you.
The first decision you need to make is how much work you want to do, and how much work you want to let Virtual Merchant do for you. Virtual Merchant can accept as little as two pieces of data from your Website, and do the rest of the work on its own, by gathering information from your customer and using the settings that have been configured by your company in the Virtual Merchant administration section. On the other hand, you could go as far as using Virtual Merchant as a backend feature to your Website, completely transparent to your customers, in which you write the page that gathers all of the pertinent customer information and the receipt page that displays the outcome of the transaction processing to the user. We find that most merchants fall somewhere in the middle of these scenarios, gathering some data from their customers before sending them out to Virtual Merchant and then letting Virtual Merchant gather more information from the customer and displaying the receipt after credit card approval.
Contents
General Overview
Flowchart
Payment Form
Virtual Merchant Provided Form
Merchant Provided Form
Receipt Options
Virtual Merchant Provided Receipt
Merchant Provided Receipt
Best Practices
Features
Appendices
Appendix 1: Input values
Appendix 2: Response Codes
Appendix 3: Virtual Merchant Error Numbers and Messages
Appendix 4: ProcessXML.do
Glossary of Terms
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PDF Ebook Virtual Merchant
