[thelist] Question about Miva, merchant accounts, and security

Jen Langley jlangley at pobox.com
Tue Oct 21 14:57:36 CDT 2003


I work for a national non-profit that sells their curriculum guides,
handbooks, etc to affiliates online. We'd been using a super old
ColdFusion solution that a consultant wrote for us a while back.
We wanted something new that was simple and easily changed (and that could
track inventory).

Our hosting account at Intermedia comes with Miva Merchant. I've imported
all of the product info into Miva's not-so-intuitive interface and am
almost ready to go, but am super confused about my next steps and was
hoping someone here had dealt with this and could help me out.

We have a POS credit card machine in-house that we use when people pay for
our conferences and buy our handbooks, etc. Previously, the user would
fill out a form online & the info would be emailed to our order
fulfillment person who would then forward it to Fiscal and they'd process
the cc # manually.

So now I've got Miva Merchant up & running and it appears we need a
merchant account if we'll stick with Miva. The first time I brought this
up with my VP, he didn't want to spend the money (since we already have an
in-house PoS) and I didn't have a great argument for it.

My question is, is this way more secure than users visiting an SSL
encrypted page which then emails the data to us? Or with a merchant
account is the exact same done, only the data is mailed to the bank? I'm a
little mixed up about this and want to know how to frame my argument for a
merchant account (I personally think the way we're doing it now is
archaic... even if it's not less secure).

Thanks for any help.
Jen.


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