e-Payment FAQs

Comtrust provides online credit card payment processing services to its merchants. Comtrust merchants can accept credit card payments made with Visa^® and MasterCard^®.

A merchant account (with an acquiring bank) is required to process card not present mail order / telephone order (MO/TO) transactions. Such an account can be maintained with an acquiring bank that is connected to Comtrust payment gateway.

An acquiring bank provides account to businesses that enable them to accept credit card payments.

Comtrust payment gateway is connected to three acquiring banks in the UAE. These are National Bank of Dubai (NBD), National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) and Emirates Bank International Limited (EBIL).

An issuing bank issues credit cards to consumers and is responsible for collecting payments.

In order to accept online credit card payments, you must open a merchant account with an acquiring bank that is connected to Comtrust payment gateway. Once this account has been opened, Comtrust will provision a payment services account on its payment gateway based on the information received from the acquiring bank.

You can incur a chargeback if a customer disputes a transaction charged to his/her credit card. In case of a chargeback, the acquiring bank will remove the money from your account.

An authorization is requested, once a customer decides to purchase from you web site. The payment details are sent through the acquiring bank to the issuing bank, requesting authorization for the purchase amount.

A settlement request is initiated once the customer order has been fulfilled. The merchant will log on to the Comtrust Payment System to request payment (by capturing the required transactions) from the acquiring bank for fulfilled orders.

A credit occurs when the merchant requests a refund to the customer account, for example in the case of faulty goods or returned shipments.

An authorization normally expires within two weeks. Duration of time for capturing an authorization is determined by the policy of the issuing bank.

Yes. You can initiate the reversal of a previously sent authorization request.

This means to split a transaction into parts for delivery so the payment can be adjusted accordingly. This situation occurs when a merchant cannot fulfill a purchase order immediately due to stock limitations, but does not wish to decline the order.

The following diagram illustrates the process flow for a transaction carried out on a system using Comtrust payment services.

The merchant is responsible for opening a merchant account with an acquiring bank that is connected to Comtrust payment gateway. Furthermore, the merchant is also responsible for the integration of the online applications (that require online payment capabilities) with Comtrust payment gateway. Comtrust Professional Services can also help the merchant with the integration effort.

Comtrust provides daily reports for the authorized and captured transactions. These reports are encrypted to ensure that the confidentiality or integrity of this sensitive content is not compromised.

You will need to sign an agreement with the acquiring bank. A separate agreement will need to be signed with Comtrust. There is no requirement to sign a contract with the credit card associations (Visa, MasterCard).

Comtrust provides a user-friendly web based interface to merchants for account management. Merchants’ just needs to bookmark the URL and log in with the user name and password.

You can display prices in either Arab Emirates Dirham (AED) or US Dollars (USD) on your web site.

SPI stands for Store Payment Interface and it provides a high-level interface for secure communication between the merchant web server and Comtrust payment gateway.

SPI is available in three different flavours. Virtually, these SPI flavours are available for all system platforms. These:

• SPIx - For Microsoft ActiveX environment
• SPIj - For Java based environment
• SPIg – For CGI (Perl) based environment

Is the SPI evaluation copy (available for download) the standard or professional version?

The evaluation copy of the SPI will be converted to the professional version after Comtrust provides you with the activation code. Comtrust will provide the activation code as soon as your contract with the merchant bank has been finalized and the merchant details have been provided to Comtrust. Based on these merchant details, Comtrust will provision your service and provide the activation code. Using this code, the SPI will convert to the professional version allowing you to use the live production system.

Yes. By using the “pmFullCapture” request type, both the authorization and capture steps are performed in one go.

Transactions can be grouped separately based on either using a separate order ID (order ID for books different from the order ID for flowers) or using the order descriptions.

How can I use the payment system to generate recurrent payment instructions (e.g., monthly subscription transactions)?

You will have to configure your application to generate such payment requests. The payment system will then process these transactions.

Please note that you will be provided with a user ID and password to access the system. The creation of a production payment account is subject to Comtrust receiving the merchant details from your acquiring bank.

It appears that a number of orders have been processed on my web site which have not appeared on the Comtrust Payment System. I know that the orders have been processed by the payment gateway and accepted, as I have received approval codes. Why is this?

This happens when there are duplicate orders ID for more then one order. In this case you will not be able to see all of the orders having the same ID and will only see one order.

The SPI has been configured to assign a unique order ID for each order by default. However, this option can be disabled to have your own order ID assigned for every order.

You can easily resolve this issue by resetting the SPI to assign a unique ID automatically for each order. Follow these steps:

1. Use the "Configuration Utility" that comes with the SPI (Start Menu Þ Programs Þ Comtrust Þ Store Payment Interface (ActiveX) Þ Configuration Utility)

2. Make sure you give the right permission in your registry using the "regedt32" utility. (Start Menu Þ Run Þ Then type "regedt32")

SPI is a COM component with built-in functionality for payment integration. This enables applications to make payment requests directly by calling the SPI component from the Communications Server implemented in C++. As such, the SPI will work with most custom-built applications.