Businesses, and individuals who want to sell products and services online have to run a sometimes confusing gauntlet, and while necessary, there are really only a few really tough hurdles.

Web-based business, like all small businesses, turn to banks to help set up merchants accounts with Visa and Master Card. and these banks and other financial institutions charge a fee for processing, after checking the credit history of everyone involved, of course. It should be remembered that many banks still treat online clients in a different way, though, charging fees and not assuming liabilities for fees and expenses they do not any longer normally charge "brick and mortar" traditional stores with much higher overhead.

Banking and financial institutions made the changeover to accepting instant instantaneous credit and debit card transaction by employing the growing, national clearinghouse processors.

To this day, though no longer holding a monopoly on validation of their own cards, MasterCard and Visa, for example, offered such merchant services using their own private networks in a highly competitive effort to get business and banks only to accept their particular brand or suite of credit cards, like Visa and MasterCard, American Express, and Discover. Today, all credit card payments happens by way of Internet Protocol over "virtual private networks," or VPN's for all business that accept credit cards. Just as when a customer checks out of any store, when a customer checks out of an online store and the website get the numbers punched in by a customer from their credit card, and a third party company is validating the authenticity of the cardholder's card, making the transaction possible.

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