Posts Tagged ‘Cardholders’

Vital Credit Card Vocabulary – Part I

February 28th, 2011



Have you ever study one of the card holder’s agreements for one of your credit cards? If you’re like some people in general the reply is no. Furthermore, I don’t blame you. Those agreements are written in legalese and squeezed together in tiny little print that is just about legible. The whole story is that credit card organizations don’t really want you to read it.They’d rather you remain unaware. But it is incredibly worthwhile that you presently work out the main terminology of the agreement that illuminate how your balance is calculated and what generates bills or interest increases.

Understanding the terms of your debt card agreement will help you to compare cards, to know when you should switch to a new card, and to save capital by working with this nifty system. To get you commenced, here is a record of main terms used in consumer credit card agreements and what they suggest:

Pre-approved – How many times have you acquired an offer in the mail stating that you have been ‘pre-approved’ for a personal credit card? This is a little deceptive habit as you have not at all been pre-approved for anything. All it signifies is that you suddenly met some initial criteria for creditworthiness. There is no warranty you will be approved for the cash card if you opt to apply.

Annual Charge – Many financial credit cards charge an annual membership fee to their cardholders. Often, the cost ranges from around $ 25 to $75; nevertheless some top class cards charge as much as several hundred dollars.

Contract Charge – Credit card issuers regularly will bill you a commission for transactions except purchases, such as cash advances and revenue account transfers, even though they occasionally waive these costs for brand new cardholders as part of their introductory offer. The fee expense is regularly calculated as a percentage of the deal, though a minimum fee applies. Some issuers will cap the interest at an exact dollar amount; nonetheless those opportunities are nowadays few and distant between.

Grace Period – Profiting from a credit card’s grace period will permit you to keep away from paying finance charges by paying your running account in full prior to the due date. If there is no grace time, interest will start accruing the day you use the card. However, if the loan card has a grace period of say 21 days, interest will not initiate accruing for 3 weeks as long as you settled your bank account the previous month.

Brainy customers use the grace period to keep away from paying finance bills on their purchases while creating the convenience of using a credit card in contrast to cash.

Credit Card Identification Features

February 26th, 2011



The ability to clearly identify a credit card account in a card-not-present transaction, using the account information provided by the cardholder, and to verify its validity is crucial for eCommerce merchants. Credit and debit cards bear several identification features that make them unique and help merchants and cardholders prevent their fraudulent use. These features are used during the transaction authorization process as well. ECommerce merchants should implement the following best practices to ensure that transactions are processed in a safe and secure manner:

Request that customers provide both the account number and the card type and ensure that they match. Consider applying the following procedures:

Request that customers select their payment card’s type (Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Discover, etc.) before they enter the card’s account number. Verify the validity of the provided account information by comparing the selected card type and the first digit of the provided card number. The credit card companies use different account numbering systems. For example, only Visa card account numbers begin with a 4, only MasterCard account numbers begin with a 5, only Discover card account numbers begin with a 6, only American Express card account numbers begin with a 3, etc. Display an error message if there is a mismatch between the selected card type and the provided account number and request that the customer re-enters the data. Allow customers to enter card account numbers with or without hyphens, with or without spaces between digits, or clearly identify your preferred format. Request that customers provide their payment card’s expiration date. You can either provide a blank field to be filled in by the customer or a pull-down menu from which the customer to make a selection. If you choose the latter option, make sure that you do not provide a default month and year of the expiration date to prevent the customer from erroneously select it. The default date will most likely be different from the actual one and the transaction will be declined.