CyberCash

Topic: CyberCash

[ features ] [ additional information ] [ links ]

CyberCash is rapidly becoming the de facto solution for collecting money on the Internet. They have a stable online network, relationships with lots of banks, a willingness to forge new relationships where necessary, and best of all, they don't charge an exorbitant chunk of your profit.

We can help you with CyberCash, or we can help you help yourself, in the following ways:

[ go! ]	We can help you understand the CyberCash service.
[ go! ]	We can offer you a free AOLserver extension if you want to roll your own solution.
[ go! ]	We can help you set up the CyberCash MCK on your server and integrate it with your storefront.
[ go! ]	We offer a complete end-to-end, inexpensive electronic commerce service on our server.
[ go! ]	We can license you our electronic commerce server to run on your own server.
[ go! ]	We can help you develop your own completely customized electronic commerce solution.

In short, you name it, we're ready to jump in and help, even if you're using somebody else's software. Really. And we'll answer questions for free, so don't hesitate to ask away.

MCK? What's that?
The term "CyberCash" is often used inaccurately to refer to CyberCash's out-of-box connection software, the Merchant Connectivity Kit (MCK). The MCK is a set of CGI scripts that may be integrated with a merchant's storefront in order to provide connectivity to CyberCash's online transaction server network. However, any software may be used to provide that connectivity as long as it talks to the network correctly. We at Vivtek, for instance, have implemented an interface in Tcl for AOLserver (one of our free downloads.) If you're interested in rolling your own AOLserver solution and want to use our CyberCash integration, just click here to find out more.

The MCK doesn't include shopping-cart functionality, and requires the availability of SSL on your server to encrypt the communication between customer and your server (the MCK will handle the encryption between your server and CyberCash, which is an extremely high-level encryption). So you may well be interested in investigating our electronic commerce solution for small business, which takes all that stuff and puts it on our server, where we can administer it easily and you don't have to, and gives you a wide range of services that will help you and your customers have a more effective relationship. We think this is a pretty good option, so please take a look if you're interested in integrating online commerce with your site.

Now that you've sat through the sales pitch, if you want to integrate CyberCash on your own, feel perfectly free to do so. Over the coming weeks, we're going to be including a lot more information about the technical details of CyberCash integration here, so bookmark the page. If you have any specific questions that don't seem to be covered here, visit our answers page to ask us and we'll try to improve our presentation.

MDPs and how to find help
CyberCash has a network of Merchant Development Partners (MDPs), consulting organizations who can assist merchants with the technical issues of integrating CyberCash online transaction processing with their Websites. Vivtek is an MDP, and if you need help with your CyberCash integration, then feel free to contact us at any time. We'll be happy to help out, even if it's just to answer your questions. You can also find plenty of other MDPs at the CyberCash website

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Here's some more information we have about CyberCash, some of it quite useful.

Information for the Internet merchant
This is an incredibly useful explanation of the whole online payment thing. Read this if you have any questions at all! We've found this page extremely useful.
Anatomy of a CyberCash transaction
This is a kind of cute Shockwave cartoon about the steps that a transaction goes through. It's a nice switch from the dense text version of the explanation.
Our experiences integrating CyberCash with AOLserver
Even if you don't use AOLserver, you might want to check this out for some more perspective on the technical end of the CyberCash service.
POP codes returned from CyberCash
The first in a series of pages about how to integrate your site with CyberCash. The POP code returns are what you get back after a CC transaction.

FEATURES

Free. CyberCash doesn't cost anything to the merchant in most cases, because the financial institution pays CyberCash for the service. Your bank will charge you for credit card transactions, but they do that anyway for phone transactions, so you're not losing anything.
Good merchant support. Although they can deal slowly with non-emergency cases, CyberCash never fails to respond to a question in a helpful manner.
Easy to integrate. CyberCash has really gone the extra mile to deliver an out-of-box package that is easy to integrate with an existing website. And while technical documentation of the MCK is thin, at least their example code is fairly easy to read.

LINKS

CyberCash home page
Everything you ever wanted to know about CyberCash can be found here, although not always where you would expect to find it, which is one reason we're putting together this topic.
Vivtek's ecomm service
We don't usually blow our own horn in these links, but this is one case where we'll make an exception. We really think that our solution is good, and our pricing is very low. And it's so much easier to administer than the MCK that we think it deserves looking at. So, sorry. We're linking to it anyway.