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Procedure about real-time transaction

Credit card sales transaction processes and completes within 24 hours in general. So it’s called real time transaction. Customer purchase an order on the merchant’s website after the checkout, the merchant’s website send payment request through the API interface to third party gateway. Than the gateway sends the transaction request to the bank system. The acquiring bank send the transaction request to the Card association, the card association pass the request to the customer’s card issuer. The issuing bank than responds a parameter and debits the amount from the customer credit card statement. The card association receives the transaction response from the issuing bank, and pass the response to the acquiring bank. The acquiring bank return the transaction result to the merchant through payment gateway. The merchant receives the transaction result by the returned code: success or failed. For success transaction, the merchant needs to prepare the shipment/service and notify their customer regarding the details.

For real-time transaction payment by credit card, if a cancellation is requested, the merchant will have to request refund. Cross border refund procedure takes 2-4 working weeks between the bank system. Some may take up to or over 45 working days. It will be dependent on the bank system. For refunds takes longer than the standard time frame, it’s recommended that the customer directly contact their issuer to check the refund procedure.

The real-time transaction is also required to be monitored by system or manually 24 hours. As some risk is possibly contained in the online credit card transaction. So the checking at real-time is needed to catch risk transactions, such as: fraud transactions, stolen card transaction, duplicated transactions, etc.