SECURECARD

Secure Credit Card Transmission

The Internet promises to take commerce into the next century with a new degree of convenience for the consumer. With the ability to sit at home and browse through the illustrated catalogs of thousands of companies, consumers can place orders for products they had never seen or heard of only minutes before.

However, this level of convenience is not without its risks. The preferred method of payment in online commerce is credit cards. And as most of us are well aware, sending credit card information over the Internet can be risky.

It has been said that sending information over the Internet is no more secure than sending it through the mail on a postcard. Certainly, your credit card number is sensitive information, and you would think twice before writing it on a postcard, so why send it over the Internet unprotected.

An alternative to sending your credit card number over the Internet is to use one of the online banking systems in operation on the Internet today.

These systems allows you to register your credit card number with them. The system then issues you it's own internal account number, which is then linked to a transaction system of some kind. Rather than sending your credit card number over the Internet, you send your account number, and the banking system then verifies the purchase with you in a separate communication, essentially allowing you to "sign" for each transaction.

However, these systems have a couple of major drawbacks. One is simply that the merchant must setup a merchant account with the banking system. Since there are multiple such systems in operation today, none of which are compatible with one another, the merchant must choose which part of the public he wishes to accomodate.

Also, these systems require the customer to take an extra step in order to make a purchase. And to make matters worse, that step usually involves a membership of some kind, which can serve to hamper those ready to make an impulse purchase, and scare off those wishing to make a big-ticket purchase.

One of the fundamentals of marketing and sales is that the purchase should be as simple and easy as possible for the customer. Nowhere is this more important than online, where a customer can decide not to purchase right up until he presses the "Submit" button.

These online banking systems seem to violate that very basic premise, requiring the customer to signup for a membership and even install complex software on their own computer- all just to make a purchase!

Encryption is not new to the Internet scene. In fact, it has been around since before the Internet even existed.

Data encryption protects your sensitive data by encoding in such a way that only the intended recipient is able to decode it, making it useless for a cyberspace eavesdropper who may be listening in on the exchange, and giving you the freedom to make purchases at any time, without any prior arrangments.

But pitfalls abound here as well. The most popular form of encryption, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), is unique to just a few browsers and servers. Customers not having one of those browsers would be unable to make secure purchases online.

And again, the many other forms of encryption which other browsers do support are not compatible with one another. In order for a purchase to be secure, it must be made with the right browser/server combination, or the link is not secure.

Netmar SecureCard works around this shortcoming of modern encryption by using a unique encryption method that causes World Wide Web browsers that are NOT equipped with encryption software to actually create an encrypted response string that only the server can decode.

Netmar SecureCard allows for all of the freedom of encryption technology, and all of the security of online banking systems without requiring any customer preregistration and without limiting your customers in any way. SecureCard works with ALL forms-capable World Wide Web browsers, enabling you to take instant, secure credit card orders from anyone browsing the Web, no matter what browser they're using.

SSL has yet another weakness, in that it does not address the entirety of a purchasing transaction. Usually, the seller of goods is not the owner of the World Wide Web server by which the sale is made. That means that the purchase information must be sent to the seller in some way. Well, SSL provides no secure method for that transmission. So after all the security measures that have been taken to maintain a private link between the buyer and the server, the credit card number is usually then emailed over the Internet, unencrypted, to the seller!
Netmar SecureCard provides security for the entire buyer/seller link, providing four different methods by which the buyer may receive the ordering information from the server.