Methods that communicate directly to Credit Card Gateways are known within this document as ”processing methods”. There are four types of processing methods that will be described in this section: Authorisation methods, Monetary methods (Debit), Monetary methods (Credit) and Cancellation method.

Authorisation transactions are those that reserve an amount of money from a credit card which can be later debited. There are two types of authorisation: preauthorization and authorisation. Preauthorization is used to verify that the credit card details are valid and Authorisation is used to actually reserve the amount which will be later debited from the account. The length of time that funds are reserved are payment gateway/processor specific and are not controllable by the DSB interface.

Monetary transactions (Debit) are those methods that debit from credit cards rather than those that only reserve money. These methods are: Capture and Purchase. Capture is used for two-tiered payment processes and Purchase is used for one-tier. Monetary methods are normally executed from the back-end system i.e. AVS/3 or VHS/3, as they cause a cash-flow process that needs to be monitored for book keeping.

The two-tiered payment method is used for mail order selling. During order entry, only a reservation of money is made upon the credit card (an Authorisation). This first stage is executed by the shop but the actual debit is a back office job. The Authorisation method returns a transaction UUID which is used by the shop to associate an Order with a payment. Once this association has been made (by including the transaction UUID within an Order) and assuming that the Order is in itself correct and bookable – the back-end system will finalise the payment within the invoice process.

Monetary transactions (Credit) are all transactions that are not a two-tiered process. The methods are: Bookback, Refund. Bookback refers to a previous capture whilst Refund is not associated with any previous transaction.

Cancellation transaction is able to cancel monetary transactions provided that the debit/credit has not yet carried them out. Payment Gateways decide when these monetary transactions are carried out but they are usually executed at the end of the working day in a batch process. Therefore, cancellations should be made as soon as possible to ensure that they are successful.

The next section will describe all processing methods. eShops only need to execute Authorisation and Cancel as the rest is carried out by the back office.

You have to inform dsb in advance which methods should be used. The backend systems AVS/3 and VHS must be configured too.

The transaction methods provided by payment providers are categorised by DSB into different processing types. The following illustration serves as an overview:

All payment procedures begin with a ”start transaction”. Depending on if it is a single or two-tiered transaction, a ”following transaction” may be needed.

Single-tiered transactions are: purchase, refund

Two-tiered transactions are: authorise, preauthorise

Following transactions are: capture, cancel, bookback

A start transaction can occur with or without credit card details. Transactions without credit card details increase the security as only a reference id needs to be sent. This can only occur when the credit card details have already been sent in a previous request and when that request has been signalled as being able to be reused (achieved by changing the transaction type to ‘Initial’). The response of an ‘Initial’ transaction includes this reference id ( named ‘cc-repeating-transaction-id’) that can be used in place of the credit card details for future ‘Repeating’ transactions (those transactions that have the transaction type ‘Repeating’).