WebCommerce Glossary

• Acquiring Bank/Merchant Bank - The bank that does business with merchants who accept credit cards. A merchant has an account with this bank and each day deposits the value of the day's credit card sales. Acquirers buy (acquire) the merchant's sales slips and credit the tickets' value to the merchant's account.
  
  
• Acquiring Processor - The processor provides credit card processing, billing, reporting and settlement and operational services to acquiring and issuing banks. Many financial institutions don't do their own bank card processing because it's more cost-effective to let someone like CSI invest in the equipment and people and do it for them.
  
  
• Authorization - The act of insuring that the cardholder has adequate funds available against their line of credit. A positive authorization results in an authorization code being generated, and those funds being set aside. The cardholder's available credit limit is reduced by the authorized amount.
  
  
• Back Office – the secure, password-protected component of WebCommerce where a merchant manages his store's properties, tax tables, shipping tables, categories, products, their options and values, and orders as well as allows him to build or delete preview stores and build or delete published stores.
  
  
• Batch - The accumulation of captured transactions waiting to be settled. Multiple batches may be settled throughout the day.
  
  
• Capture - Converting the authorization amount into a billable transaction record within a Batch. Transactions cannot be captured unless previously authorized, and authorizations cannot be captured until the goods or services have been shipped or transmitted to the consumer.
  
  
• Cardholder - Any person who opens a credit card account and makes purchases using a credit card.
  
  
• Cardservice International – a corporation that processes credit card transactions.
  
  
• Categories – a feature in the WebCommerce Back Office that lets a merchant define how he wants to organize his products. When products are logically and attractively organized so that they are easier to find, shoppers are more successful at locating products they wish to purchase.
  
  
• Checkout Stand – the shipping and payment-processing component of WebCommerce. A shopper goes to the Checkout Stand once he has decided to purchase the products he has placed in his Shopping Cart. At the Checkout Stand he will fill in his bill-to and ship-to information, along with his chosen method of payment.
  
  
• Credit Card Processor – a corporation that manages the process of transferring authorized and captured credit card funds between different financial accounts. These corporations typically charge merchants a discount rate and a transaction fee for this service. These fees vary from processor to processor. Cardservice International is an example of such a processor.
  
  
• Credit Deposit - The value of a merchant's credit card purchases that are credited to its bank account after the acquirer buys the merchant's sales slips. The deposit is credited. It is not funded until the acquirer gets the monetary value from the issuer during settlement.
  
  
• Crypto box – a commonly used term that refers to a piece of hardware which contains one or more encryption software applications.
  
  
• CyberCash – CyberCash® is a corporation that offers a secure gateway through which credit card information is passed to the private network used by all the financial institutions for authorization and capture of credit card funds.
  
  
• Discount Rate - The fee a merchant pays its acquiring bank/merchant bank for the privilege to deposit the value of each day's credit purchases. The fee is usually a small percentage of the purchase value.
  
  
• Ecommerce – a term with multiple meanings: 1) short for electronic commerce, meaning any sale/purchase that takes place over the Internet; 2) industry pundits and the media often use it to mean large retailers such as Amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com; 3) entire “systems” sold by companies such as IBM to large enterprises selling products over the Internet; 4) downloadable software or on-line browser-supported applications that allow anyone to sell products over the Internet.
  
  
• Firewall – a series of network security measures that establish and monitor restricted access to a network of servers.
  
  
• HTML - stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, the standard set of formatting codes which are inserted into a text file to be published on the World Wide Web. These codes affect how the text in the file will be displayed when viewed over the Internet by people using Mosaic and other World Wide Web browsers. It also tells the web browser where to find other resources (such as images) displayed within the page or which have been hotlinked to it.
  
  
• Interchange - The exchange of information, transaction data and money among banks. Interchange systems are managed by Visa and MasterCard associations and are very standardized so banks and merchants worldwide can use them.
  
  
• Interchange Fee - A fee paid by the acquiring bank/merchant bank to the issuing bank. The fee compensates the issuer for the time after settlement with the acquiring bank/merchant bank and before it recoups the settlement value from the cardholder.
  
  
• Issuer - The bank that extends credit to customers through bankcard accounts. The bank issues the credit card and receives the cardholder's payment at the end of the billing period. Also called the issuing bank or the cardholder bank.
  
  
• Merchant – a storeowner.
  
  
• Merchant Administration Area – the password-protected area in the CyberCash web site that merchants use to manage their individual CyberCash accounts. This area allows them to issue a “capture” funds request for specific transactions as well as to void transactions.
  
  
• Merchant ID – A credit card processor assigns this unique computer code to a merchant after he has been successfully approved to take credit card purchases. This code identifies his specific bank account into and out of which credit card funds are transferred.
  
  
• Options – a feature in the WebCommerce Back Office where the merchant defines the options that are offered with his products. Options are items such as: color, size, height, shape, flavor, length.
  
  
• Price threshold – a method of charging for shipping. The merchants defines the various price ranges and assigns a dollar amount for shipping charges to each range.
  
  
• Properties – a feature in the WebCommerce Back Office where the merchant defines specific pieces of information necessary to running his on-line store, such as: the store's name, address, contact information, where its logo graphic is located, whether or not the store is open to take orders, etc.
  
  
• Real-time credit card processing – when a credit card purchase is “authorized” while a shopper is on-line. If the credit card is denied, the shopper has another opportunity to enter in another credit card number to be authorized. Available only to CyberCash Gateway subscribers who have a WebCommerce service plan account.
  
  
• Settlement - As the sales transaction value moves from the merchant to the acquiring bank, to the issuer, each party buys and sells the sales ticket. Settlement is what occurs when the acquiring bank and the issuer exchange data or funds during transactions.
  
  
• Shopper – an individual purchasing products from a merchant's store.
  
  
• Shopping Cart – the order-processing component of WebCommerce. A shopper uses the Shopping Cart to select and temporarily store which products he wishes to purchase while browsing through a merchants store.
  
  
• SSL –The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Protocol is a protocol developed by Netscape Communications which provides secure communications between the server and client, preventing others from capturing or viewing the data being exchanged. Netscape has extensive information on the SSL Protocol.
  
  
• Store – At WebCom, a store is considered to be a set of catalog pages placed on the WebCom servers by the WebCommerce application. The store's shoppers have full use of the Shopping Cart and Checkout Stand.
  
  
• Store Builder – the component of WebCommerce that automatically creates an on-line store from the information the merchant enters in the WebCommerce Back Office, also called "Catalog Creator".
  
  
• Terminal ID – a term used to indicate the specific merchant ID used by a merchant to process a specific category of transactions. A merchant who handles retail sales transactions, phone/fax/mail order transactions and Internet transactions will likely have one master merchant ID for his retail store and two additional terminal IDs, one each for his phone/fax/mail orders and Internet transactions.
  
  
• Ticket - Another name for the sales slip or its monetary value that results when a credit card purchase is made.
  
  
• Transaction – a transaction is considered by most credit card processors to take place when a request for authorization or capture is passed through to them. Therefore, each authorization request and each capture request is a separate transaction. However, you should check with your credit card processor to determine their specific definition of a “transaction”.
  
  
• User ID – a unique identifier selected by a person opening an account. At WebCom, you can potentially have two different User IDs. One for your WebCom service plan and one for your WebCommerce store.
  
  
• Values – a feature that's part of Options in the WebCommerce Back Office where the merchant defines the values used by the Options. If an Option is “size”, then its corresponding values might be “small, medium, large”.
  
  
• WebCommerce – a browser-supported application that builds on-line stores from data and graphics provided by a merchant.
  
  
• Weight threshold – a method of charging for shipping. The merchant defines the various weight ranges and assigns a dollar amount for shipping charges to each range.