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ProPay accounts in the US are often afforded the ability to process eCheck transactions (in addition to credit cards.) Using ProPay as your ACH provider is handy because we allow you to submit transactions via API, or on our online portal rather than requiring you to “batch up” transactions and submit requests as a specially formatted NACHA file. Trust us, you want nothing to do with that.
ACH Payments vs. Credit Cards
Taking an ACH payment is typically very cheap. Processing a credit card less so. Before you begin to process eCheck transactions, though, you should carefully consider the main difference between ACH payments and credit card payments, and understand the benefits that the latter process brings to the table.
When you process a credit card, an event takes place called an ‘Authorization’ (sometimes referred to as a pre-auth). An authorization will always provide the merchant with a guarantee that the money is yours. In very rare cases, a payer can “chargeback” a transaction after the fact, claiming that the transaction wasn’t made with his or her authorization. For the most part, a credit card accepting merchant can be sure that money is guaranteed.
Not so with an eCheck transaction. No authorization takes place, and there is really no way to know, when you accept an ACH Payment, that the “check won’t bounce.” In fact, if you accept eCheck on the web, you are probably even more likely to have “checks bounce” than a merchant who accepts paper checks in a store. An ACH Reject is analogous to a credit card chargeback, but much more likely because it can occur whenever there is no money in the account from which you attempt to draw funds.
ProtectPay and ACH Payments
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard applies to credit and debit cards, and not to ACH Payments. There probably should be something similar to that standard, though, and ProPay recommends ProtectPay for processing these kinds of payments just as we do for payment cards
Click here to learn how to process transactions with ProtectPay.
If you feel comfortable managing your own data, you can process using the ProPay Merchant Services API. Click here to learn how, and here to learn about refunds with the Propay Merchant Services API. |