[mythtv-users] Supporting schedulesdirect.org

[William Munson]

David Brodbeck wrote:
> <snip>
> Well, if you're a big enough company, presumably the risk is  
> outweighed by the extra business you can do, and you can pay people  
> to do nothing but make sure you don't get ripped off.
>
>   

You guys are missing the point here. The scene you describe is not valid 
for this sort of situation. What we have here is an account system where 
you have to set up an account in order to access the listing just like 
datadirect. This should require confirming a email address. Then once 
the account is active you can enter your CC info and again confirm with 
an email to prove its you who made the change. To limit abuse limit the 
number of CC changes to 2 or 3 per month. This is the end of bad credit 
card problems since you have all the address info to be able to confirm 
with the CC issuer. Can be done with a simple pre-authorization 
transaction, the return code will confirm if the address info given 
matches the issuer's account info. With this system there is a very low 
rate of bad transactions, most will be from NSF bounces when the charge 
is processed. Another option is to drop the pre-auth and just set up the 
CC acceptance rules to deny any mismatched billing address attempts. 
Thats a standard feature of all merchant accounts and actually saves you 
transaction fees since the risk is lower.
I have accepted CC online for a long time now and yes there are expenses 
associated with it but if you work with a decent processor then you can 
limit the damage pretty well. The rest you just build into the charges 
for service.

Bill


PS - I have been a PayPal merchant for years and they have always done 
right for me. They are expensive but do a good job when your volumes are 
small. Not the best choice for an operation the size this one will end up.