Please note:  the information and instructions which follow are intended only for use by Michigan State University colleges and departments.

This page describes how to set up a new webCredit Merchant Account or "store." There are two things you must do:

Background

MSU's bankcard processor has a contract with VeriSign. VeriSign Payment Services provides the software used to make bankcard transactions on the Web possible. AIS provides software called webCredit that communicates with VeriSign to authorize and process credit card transactions.  Most MSU merchants share a single VeriSign credit card merchant called MSUOnline.  The webCredit software makes it possible for each store to maintain its own transactions while avoiding having to set up individual merchant accounts for each office.

One of the major advantages to using webCredit to handle your online credit card processing is that you are not required to prepare a Cashier's Office deposit slip as you are for cash, checks and terminal-based credit card transactions.  Instead, each night, JVEs are automatically generated for each webCredit store so that your account is credited with the charges you have processed.

webCredit stores pay similar discount and authorization fees for online credit card transactions as they do for the regular credit card charges (details are available from the Cashier's Office).  VeriSign also charges all its merchant accounts a monthly processing fee.  (For complete details, please see the AIS Billing Rates page.)  For all stores under the MSUOnline merchant, all fees are totaled and divided among the stores according to the dollar amount charged.  This means that if you set up a store that for six weeks accepts payments for a conference your department is hosting, you will pay monthly fees only when your store is taking in revenue.  As with revenues, monthly fees are calculated and are automatically charged to the account you specify by JVE. 

Once you begin to accept credit card payments over the Web, you will be able to generate reports of the activity of your store on whatever schedule you choose.  These reports will help you reconcile revenues and fees with monthly ledger reports from the MSU accounting system.

Information Needed to Set Up a New webCredit Store

To activate a new webCredit store, you will need to answer a series of questions.  Whenever you wish, you may link to the Sign Up a New Merchant screens on webCredit.  You will be asked to provide the following information:

Additional Information for New webCredit Merchants

Once your new merchant account is ready, AIS will notify you that testing of your web site is possible.  You will also have the opportunity to attend a training session on the webCredit software.  Department managers, accounting staff who will handle webCredit processing and departmental webmasters are welcome to attend.

What You Need To Do On Your Web Site

As noted above, you may set up a webCredit store in which you plan to only manually enter credit card transactions when customers call, write or visit.  If however, you want to accept credit cards from a departmental web site, we will set up a test webCredit store for your use. On your web site, you must create a form to pass us specific fields so that we can communicate with VeriSign to obtain credit card authorization. To simplify this task, we have developed a model form which you can use to cut and paste each of the form fields that you need to pass to us. Note that some fields are marked as "required." Please refer to http://webcredit.qual.ais.msu.edu.  

Please code all field names on your new form exactly as you find them on the model form.

Your form tag should be: <FORM action="https://webcredit.qual.ais.msu.edu/chargecc.asp" method="post">

Once the webCredit store has been set up on our test server and you have tested the credit card processing, we will ensure that your production store is set up properly and will ask you to modify the form tag to point to a "production" URL.

You will notice two "checksum" fields on the model form. These fields are used to ensure that the charge amount (price) that you are passing us has not been tampered with by the customer. AIS will provide the formula you should use to calculate these fields.

Make sure the checksums are calculating correctly. If they are not, you will receive an error message stating that the checksums do not match when you test.

If you have further questions about how to set up online charge card processing, please call the AIS Help and Support Center at 353-4420, ext. 311.  They will put you in touch with someone who can answer your questions.