It’s that time of year of heavy deposits for summer camps. Camps have learned they’ll get more early bookings by allowing parents to register online than if by mail alone. Here are some tips for camp companies:

1. PCI Compliance- if you take an order via the phone, do not store the CVV code. Once you have verified the card, you no longer have a need for it anyway. All card data must be stored under lock with restricted access.

2.  There are 3 types of merchant accounts: retail, ecommerce, and MOTO (mail order/ telephone order- card not present. Make sure you have the correct type(s) since this will affect your pricing plus your compliance with Card Association Operating Rules. For example, if you have a retail account, and you run ecommerce orders, you’ll not only pay hefty additional fees, you’ll also lose any chargebacks because you won’t have a signed receipt as required for retail transactions.

3. Debit usage is nearly on par with credit cards now. If you offer recurring billing, be sure to inform the customer of your procedures. Do you send a reminder email that you will be charging their account? This will help prevent potentially overdrawn accounts.

4. On your payment page, make sure you have a checkbox for the customer to “agree” to accept your refund policy. You can use a pop up for details or have the text right there. The box should be required to be checked. This step is needed to defend against future chargebacks.

Convio is a preferred vendor for many non-profits using online fundraising. We offer low cost credit card processing solutions fully compatible with Convio, with preferred pricing for non-profit organizations.

Convio software automates the process of accepting donations by enabling nonprofits to create event sign ups and other online donation forms on the fly via a back-end web based administration dashboard. You’ll need a gateway to accept secure payments. The only true independent gateway they support is Verisign. By independent, I mean you can use this gateway with a wide variety of approved payment processing platforms. I’ve been involved in ecommerce for major companies since the 90’s and I strongly endorse Verisign. Even if it costs a bit more the PCI Compliance and fraud protection controls are worth it.

You’ll also need a payment processor. We have different solutions available for you and place you in the best one to suit various pricing, treasury and bookkeeping needs.

Convio does not support integrated Google payments or Paypal at this time.

What are the benefits of using my recommended solution for credit card processing vs one that may be offered by the Convio group?
- Wholesale pricing. The same type of pricing plans offered to the biggest companies in the world. Even though your non-profit may be big, not everyone supplier offers this pricing.
- Interchange management- The right price plan means nothing if no one is checking to see what interchange levels you hit. This is 90% + of your total costs. It is not atypical to reduce payment processing fees 20% in this area alone.
- Chargebacks- How can you avoid them? Reduce fees? This is part of our ongoing standard consultation process.
- PCI compliance- We will work with your team on a number of issues related to this. All services offered are always PCI Compliant and forward looking to meet future compliance requirements anticipated.

What’s needed to add an alternative payment processor to Convio?
- Sign a new merchant agreement
- Complete a specifications worksheet. This is really very simple. We need to know the domains where you accept donations online now, and what gateway you are using, along with a few other items.
- We send a worksheet to Convio based on your gateway. They have different requirements depending on the gateway.
- Convio does the change of payment processor.

You continue to manage your donations the same way you do now.
You access merchant statements and over 50 accounting related reports for your credit card transactions via a secure web page.
You access American Express, and Discover* reports the same way you do now.

You receive the benefits of an assigned relationship manager who will work with you to help you manage costs, compliance, fraud and other issues your non-profit is facing. There is no out of pocket cost to you for these services. Non-profits using the expertise offered will save from 5% to 30%, with double digits savings being common.

See our video: Are there lower credit card processing rates for non-profit organizations?

* In July 2009, Discover reporting and fees will be fully integrated into a single statement along with your Visa and MasterCard.

Visa recently announced several new fees impacting merchant credit card processing costs. Merchants working with us will get these announcements on their statements, in addition to any other contacts, and all costs will be passed through.

Visa Acquires Processing Fee (APF) Visa is rolling out a fee of $0.0195 on all Visa branded authorizations acquired in the US regardless of where the issuer/cardholder is located. This fee will be effective July 1, 2009. This follows a MasterCard Network Access and Brand Usage Fee (NABU) of $.0185 for all U.S. issued transactions settled with MasterCard, announced in April 2009.

Visa Zero Floor Limit Fee - (clearing without authorization) This fee is applied for any clearing transaction submitted that cannot be matched to previously approved or partially-approved authorization transactions. The new fee will be $0.10 and is effective July 1, 2009.

Visa Misuse of Authorization Fee (authorization without clearing). Beginning July, 2009, Visa will apply the announced fee of $0.045 to authorizations that are not followed by a matching clearing transaction (or in the case of a cancelled or timed out authorization, not properly reversed).

International Service Assessment Fee Effective April 4, 2009 Visa implemented the International Service Assessment (ISA) fee of 0.40% (40 basis points) on all international (non U.S. card) transactions processed by a U.S. merchant. This fee is similar to MasterCard’s existing U.S. Cross Border Assessment Fee which is 0.30%.

Editors comments: these fees are not on the general interchange schedule that most people look at, however, the clever naming does not change the fact that these are costs that will be passed on to the merchants. If you have a small average ticket, a couple of pennies could increase your effective rate about .20%. If you have a lot of dollar transactions that are not reversed, such as when setting up a free online trial account, then the $.045 could also become quite costly. Your software program may not have a solution to cancel the authorizations, but hopefully this is being addressed by the major software providers.