How to re-bill your customer’s credit card, without storing it!

Many times business and website owners want to store credit card numbers for later. This allows re-billing customers for recurring orders, and allows easier checkout for repeat customers on a website.

If a business decides they want to actually store credit card numbers, they are subjected to stricter PCI-DSS standards, and run a real risk of losing customer data just by the fact that they have it. Apart from PCI, it’s difficult to securely store credit card data as there is a multitude of technical aspects to doing it safely. If you lay it all out on paper, there is a huge amount of work, ongoing management, and liability in storing credit card numbers.

But, sometimes we still need to store credit card numbers, so how do we do it?

We simply let somebody else store it for us. If we outsource our credit card number storage to another party, we are no longer liable for that data. This is still your customer’s data, so your reputation is on the line, but not necessarily your wallet. What’s even better is that with some of today’s available services, outsourcing this can give us an easier method of re-billing our customer than if we could easily store credit cards.

Who can we store these with?

This is the easy part. Your payment gateway may have a customer storage mechanism, or customer vault. If it doesn’t, find one that does.

What this does is store your customer’s information and credit card number in the payment gateway’s secure database. If you need to charge your customer again, you simply reference their customer number and the amount you wish to charge. You can do this manually through the administrative virtual terminal of your payment gateway, or you can often do it directly through your website using an API. You can also setup recurring payments, refund, void, or credit via a customer’s stored card.

With a system like this, a developer can create a custom recurring billing system, or a user friendly “remember card” feature with your ecommerce site’s checkout system.

Which gateways support this?

The Network Merchants Gateway which we developed an integration module a few weeks ago, supports customer storage at a very low cost per month. Network Merchant’s customer storage is called the Customer Vault.

Authorize.net has a similar system called the Customer Information Manager.

There’s definitely a number of other gateways that have custom vault type systems as well. These can be integrated with a website, charged manually, or even integrated with a desktop application. A customer vault is a responsible way to outsource credit card number storage while still being able to use them.