Virtual-Charge is an easy to use Internet / Intranet PC-Charge client that allows merchants to quickly and easily process transactions, modify batches, view reports, and settle or close their batches from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day using their browser. Virtual-Charge is a virtual replacement for the bank terminals most businesses currently use to process payments today. Virtual-Charge is the next generation of electronic payment processing software that provides all the functionality merchants have come to expect from their terminal, but in a virtual environment.

          The Problem

In the world of Internet commerce, more and more Internet Service Providers (ISP's) are hosting online storefronts for merchants selling their products on the Web. Besides hosting their sites, these ISP's must provide the merchant with detailed reports showing the day to day credit card transactions taking place on the merchant's site. In addition, most merchant accounts for processing credit cards need to be reconciled with the merchant's bank at the end of each business day. These tasks become an additional, unwelcome responsibility and liability for the ISP, requiring extensive reporting and time-consuming manual intervention to maintain the accounts.

In addition, Merchants who had their virtual stores hosted on a remote site had no means to process transactions locally without buying an additional terminal or software solution. The virtual merchants had no means to verify and adjust their day’s transactions or batches. Instead, they had to rely on the hosting site or ISP to administer their batches for them. In other words, merchants lost control of their accounts.

          The Solution

Virtual-Charge provides the ideal solution for both the merchant and the ISP. It allows the ISP to focus on their core business - virtual storefront creation, web hosting services, and providing on- line payment processing solutions (e-commerce) while allowing merchants to retain complete control of their payments and deposits. It also meets the needs of the merchants by providing the transaction processing and administrative functionality they have grown accustomed to in their physical environment. Virtual-Charge provides the tools that allow merchants to easily view up-to-the minute reports of their site's transactions, reconcile their batches, and even run real-time transactions, all from their Internet browser.

Built on the proven power and flexibility of Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) technology and GO Software's PC-Charge credit card processing software, Virtual-Charge shifts control and responsibility of the merchant account to whom it belongs, the merchant. By hosting SSL sites using PC-Charge to process credit cards, ISP's can use Virtual-Charge to give the owners of those sites direct, secure access to PC-Charge's database and card processing engine.

 

Virtual-Charge is designed to be a complete client for PC-Charge for Windows. Host a secure Web site running Virtual-Charge, and give multiple users the ability to run transactions from virtually anywhere, just by connecting to the Virtual-Charge Site. Users can process online or offline transactions, view and print detailed reports, even review and settle their batches remotely.

For Microsoft Windows NT/95 based Intranets, Virtual-Charge is a complete point-of-sale client for PC-Charge. Give multiple users on your LAN the ability to process simultaneous credit card transactions through a single copy of PC-Charge. And, since this is a virtual point-of-sale, users simply use their browsers to run transactions across the network, eliminating the need to install extra software on each client machine!

Virtual-Charge is flexible. It has been designed using Microsoft’s Active Server Page (ASP) technology and complete source code is provided for easy modifications. This solution builds on the trends in the industry of using Microsoft’s NT operating system and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) as the Web Server, ASP as the bridge and HTML on the client side to insure that Virtual-Charge works with all browsers. This allows the ISP to build solutions with confidence, knowing that the solutions will work with all browsers.

Because Virtual-Charge is built with ASP and HTML code, even novice Web developers can easily change the look and feel of Virtual-Charge, without changing the way it processes transactions. Personalize Virtual-Charge to fit the themes of individual sites. For those more experienced programmers, the ASP code can also be modified if desired to change how Virtual-Charge interacts with its users. Virtual-Charge is completely customizable.

Virtual-Charge relies on the security of a Web site using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to provide absolute privacy for processing transactions through Virtual-Charge. As long as the site hosting Virtual-Charge is secure, then communication between the users browser and the server is encrypted and inaccessible by third parties. Internet Information Server 3.0 higher, and Internet Explorer and Netscape 3.0 and higher browsers fully support this type of security.

Whether you’re an ISP hosting sites for merchants or a company or individual hosting your own, Virtual-Charge can provide full transaction processing functionality and merchant account maintenance to your site. For ISP’s, the burden of settling batches and generating reports for your merchants’ sites has been lifted. For companies and individuals, there are endless possible configurations for Virtual-Charge that let you take back control of your merchant account, while developing cost-effective solutions for both the physical world (Intranet) and the virtual world (Internet).