Accepting Payment with local debit cards from foreign countries

Question

Hi all. I have an ecommerce website and I am currently accepting payments from visa, master card and all the other major cards. However, one issue I am having is accepting payment from customers using local debit cards. Say someone from China doesn't have a major credit and he wants to use his local debit card, I want be able to accept payment from him as long as its legal. How do I go about this? Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure of your definition of 'local' debit card.

I would guess that debit cards in Japan are very similar to the rest of the world. What happens is that the issuing bank uses a major card scheme such as Visa or MasterCard (or JCB - Japanese Credit Bureaux, quite popular in Asia) for its debit cards.

For example in the UK we have a 'local bank' named Halifax, which uses Visa for its debit cards. Some cardholders may say its a Halifax debit card, but the card itself will be branded with the Visa logo, and it works just like any other Visa Debit card.

You send the card detail to your payment service provider, they identify the card scheme from the first six digits (Issuer Identification Number), which tells them whether its a Visa Credit/Debit, MasterCard Credit/Debit (etc etc). The service provider then carries out any 3DSecure checks, sends the card details to the acquiring bank (you have a merchant account agreement with) and the acquiring bank forwards it to the issuing bank ('local' bank) for authorisation and clearing.

In short - dont worry about it. Your payment service provider (so long as they are reasonably proficient) will take care of these things for you.

Edit:

I'm not familiar with 'multilink' as an acquirer (do you have a webpage?) but I would have to assume they work like every other acquirer. Speak to your acquiring bank that you have a merchant agreement with (or try the payment service provider first) to see if they have links to multilink. If so, it should all be transparent as I said above.

If not, then you could technically link up directly with 'multilink' to perform authorisation and settlement yourself. This would mean you take on the role of a service provider, and all the pitfalls associated with it (mainly a much higher degree of PCI-DSS scrutiny)

Answer 2

Paypal is the only payment provider that really supports most of the local debit methods around the world. They don't have an untarnished reputation, though - there are too many horror stories from merchants about frozen accounts and dismal service to be single experiences. For these reasons, I tend to avoid them wherever I can. Also, they're not cheap. But if you're looking to serve local debit methods on an international level, I don't know any serious alternatives to them.

I'm not sure about what they support in China, though - you would have to check that out.