Gateway Providers

[Brian Matthews]

I'm trying to decide on a Gateway Server Provider for my site. Could you help me out with any recommendations? I was interested in Authorize.Net, but found that they have a problem accepting blank
spaces in the credit card field ie. 5460 7890 3491 1549 would cause an error message since there are blank spaces within the number. I noticed that your gateway provider does allow blanks. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Brian Matthews

[Rich]

I assume your talking about a gateway service which has a simple payment form on their servers and you just provide an html form submission to the gateway.

I'm not aware of any gateways that allow anything other than digits in the credit card field, although I'm sure if you search long enough you might find one.

Most of the time this kind of data filtering and validation is performed before the data is passed to the gateway. Or, you could simply instruct your customers to enter the credit card number without spaces.

Rich

[Brian Matthews]

When I pay my bill to Future Quest I can input my credit card number into 4 groups of 4 numbers, separated by blank spaces, so Future Quest's gateway provider does allow blanks within the card number.

[MikeGnitecki]

Originally posted by Brian Matthews:
When I pay my bill to Future Quest I can input my credit card number into 4 groups of 4 numbers, separated by blank spaces, so Future Quest's gateway provider does allow blanks within the card number.

Brian Matthews:

What that most likely means is just that FQ or their payment provider automaticly removes spaces (via a script). As long as the web-sites that you submit your credit card number at properly remove spaces, it doesn't matter whether you include spaces or not. The only web-site that I've seen have a problem with spaces is Dell -- as of a few months ago, their system had issues if any spaces were added.

To give you an idea of how spaces are removed, here's one line of Perl that removes spaces from the credit card number (which is stored in the variable $creditcardnumber):

$creditcardnumber =~ s/ //g;

If you want your web-site visitors to be able to enter spaces in their credit card number, perhaps you should have their credit card number passed through a CGI (Perl) script (via SSL) on your web-site that removes the spaces. You could then have the number with no spaces sent to a gateway, such as Authorize.net.

I hope this helps...

-Mike Gnitecki