Slightly off topic but how do people use these? Depending on where/what I pay, I pay with an assortment of credit cards, bank account, debit cards, paypal, etc.
Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?
I wish I could just have the ability to create virtual credit card numbers. I would be able to fill it with a certain balance, set up recurring balance refills, change the expiration date, keep a merchant whitelist, and cancel the number at any time. This gives me the opportunity to make sure that even if my card number was stolen or abused, the charge won't go through. If I sign up for a free trial or a service I only want for x months but need a card on record, I give them a virtual number and set the card up to cancel itself after the period is up. Or if I want to put all my netflix, hulu, pandora, etc charges on one number, I can set a monthly allowance for each merchant. If someone changes their prices, the charge gets declined and I can go back and reup the limit if I want.
I'd like to know the answer to this as well. Do you require login credentials from your users or what? I assume there's not some secret API for credit cards ...
Over the years, there have been many alternatives offered to the clunky process of entering in your full credit card information every time you buy something online. But to this day, I do it whenever I am shopping at a new site. (Sites where I shop routinely, such as Amazon, have my information on file.) I just haven't found a reliable alternative.
I've got a Visa card from Bank of America. I can log into their website, generate a disposable credit card number on the fly -- specifying my own credit limit and expiration date -- and then just paste the card info into the website I'm ordering from.
There's not a lot of friction in using this feature, and I use it all the time, so I find it pretty surprising that many people here seem to regard Final's implementation of the same thing as a brilliant innovation.
This is a reality in many places already. On the internet I never input any real card details, I go to the app, generate a virtual card with X amount available or for one buy only or for a single merchant for Y amount of time and use the generated card details instead.
I use Dashlane and stopped entering credit card and billing info manually 2 years ago :-)
Their tech is amazing. They autodetect credit card fields when you focus on them and show a little popover where you can choose the card that you want to use. Just click on the card and everything fills up.
http://dashlane.com - email me if you'd like a referral link to get 6 months of premium service for free, btw.
I think PayPal used to do it through a browser toolbar they had, but disbanded the service for some reason. I'm not sure if they've replaced that functionality in some other product. With Netspend, you get one of their physical cards, but you also get a login for their site where you can create as many virtual cards as you want. The virtual cards use the balance from the main card, and you can shut off each virtual card whenever you feel like it.
Generate two random numbers, save them in your database, auth those amounts on the card, void the auths, and check if the amounts the customer provides match what you saved. You can do this with nearly any payment processor. I would be surprised if there's anyone that wraps this little interaction up as a service.
Before I found Debitize, I was doing it manually with my Delta Amex Plat. I go to my transactions and am presented with the option to pay each transaction. It's pretty great. But since it's not my main CC, I would love an alternative too.
This looks interesting. I guess they're going through all of this trouble in "digital credit checking" because they don't assume everyone has a credit card?
There's probably a market for a very low friction payment system for high margin goods (e.g. virtual goods, or subscriptions), similar to just doing net terms, for individuals, online. Something where as long as you can guarantee an individual only has one account, you're willing to extend a certain amount of credit per user (not per transaction).
Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?
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