Your merchant processing might be holding back the true potential of your affiliate program. Learn how to increase conversions with better banking, fraud control, and small checkout tips. Experience level: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced Target audience: Affiliates/Publishers, Merchants/Advertisers Niche/vertical: Credit cards John Monarch, President, Monarch Holdings LLC (Twitter @papajohn56)

1. BETTER PROGRAMS THROUGH
BETTER BANKING
A credit card processing primer by John Monarch

2. THE BASICS
• Merchant Accounts/MIDs
• Gateways
• Customer Relations Management (CRM) and
Shopping Cart Software
• Approvals, Declines, Errors

3. MERCHANT ACCOUNTS
• What is a Merchant Account,
and what does “MID” mean?
• Who has Merchant Accounts?
• ISO/MSP vs IPSP vs Bank
• Paypal?
• Clickbank, Plimus, Google, etc.

4. PAYMENT GATEWAYS
• Why do I need a Gateway?
Isn’t a merchant account
enough?
• Equivalent of Point of Sale.
Passes data.
• Who provides Gateways?
Authorize, NMI
• How does a gateway impact my
business?

5. CRM/CART SOFTWARE
• CRM vs Cart – Direct
Response and eCommerce
• Why does this matter?
• What to use? Limelight,
Magento, OSCommerce, etc.
• This impacts conversions?

6. HOW EACH IMPACTS
CONVERSIONS
• Merchant Account decline rate and reasons for this
• Gateway errors
 Spaces in CC# not accepted, security violations, invalid Luhn
checksum, CVV2 invalid, expired card
• Data handling errors
• CRM errors

7. NOT ALL DECLINES ARE EQUAL
• Gateway code definitions
• Some declines may be good.
• BIN verification
• NSF – Not Sufficient Funds
(not always bad!)
• Fraud prevention

8. WHAT IS A “BIN”?
• Bank Identification Number
• Certain BINs should be blocked
• How to know which BINs to block?
• What do BINs mean?
• Sample: 511122, 489212, 448279, 514503 – all GreenDot

9. BIN MEANINGS/ISO-IEC 7812
Prefixes
• 0 – ISO/TC 68, Reserved for Future Assignment
• 1 – Airline Cards
• 2 – Airlines and Future assignments
• 3 – Travel and Entertainment, Banking & Financial. AMEX, JCB
• 4 – Banking and Financial – VISA reserved
• 5 – Banking and Financial – MasterCard, Diners Club, Maestro Debit
• 6 – Merchandising, Banking & Financial – Discover, China Union Pay
• 7 – Petroleum, future assignments. FUELMAN, Exxon, Sunoco
• 8 – Healthcare, Telecom
• 9 – National Assignment, Governments

10. EXAMPLES
• 3715** - American Express Platinum
• 356210 – HSBC Hong Kong JCB Credit Card
• 401180 – SunTrust Visa Debit Card
• 603220 – WalMart Discover Credit Card
• 923362 – SwedBank Temporary ATM (30 Day) Card
• 3715** - American Express Centurion
• 434256 – Wells Fargo Visa Debit Card
• A live example – anyone want to volunteer the first six digits?

11. INTEGRATION
• Integrating BIN verification to reduce fraud and increase conversions
• Automatic BIN rejection
• Automatic MII selection on checkout to remove an extra menu
• All combined advice can raise conversion rate up to 30%
• BIN Base, BinDB and other services

16. REFERENCES
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Identification_Number
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bank_Identification_Numbers
• *(Note: BIN list on Wikipedia is accurate, but infrequently updated)
• The American Bankers Association (http://www.aba.com/default.htm)
• http://www.binbase.com and http://www.bindb.com
• International Standards Association (http://www.iso.org)