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Re: Return and Online Orders?

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From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Apr 18, 2025 8:44AM

Hi David,
With online purchases, there are 2 parts to the transaction:
1. The order itself, such as the items or services, as well as your personal information, such as your name and address. And
2. The financial payment information, which is your credit or debit card.

The seller records the order itself and your personal information, so they keep track of it and will most likely store that data for a period of time. In most cases, they can do what they want with that information, even sell it to others.

The payment information is stored by a secure payment gateway, which forwards the info to the card network such as Visa and MasterCard.

Whoever set up the website chose the third-party company to be the payment gateway, hopefully a reputable company with security protections that meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (called a PCI-compliant gateway).

Keeping someone's financial payment data is regulated by several US laws and the credit card industry's PCI standards, so it's not in the seller's best interest to know your card information. That's why they use a payment gateway who will process and maintain the data, as well as keep it secure.

So your card number is not recorded by the vendor who sold you the class; that information is stored with the gateway and credit card network. I'm a vendor with ecommerce on our website. When someone purchases our books or classes, all I can see is their personal information, the last 4 digits of the credit card number, and a transaction number that is used by the entire system.

What's new in the past 20 years is the development of small, hybrid payment gateways, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, QuickBooks, Amazon Payments, Square, and small private-label gateways. I can't vouch for how secure they are, and personally, I try to avoid them. Everyone is aiming to tap into the trillions of dollars in processing fees involved with every financial transaction as well as your personal financial data that goes with it.

I suspect that given our current US government administration, security will lessen, and fraud will increase as our regulatory agencies are dismantled or crippled and our finance laws are shot down.

You can read more about this trillion-dollar industry at these links:
J P Morgan: https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/treasury/treasury-management/payment-gateways-what-they-are-and-how-to-choose-one
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_gateway

Hope this helps.

Bevi Chagnon | PubCom.com
Designer, Trainer, Author, Accessibility Expert
Member of the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA
Adobe Community Expert in the Adobe online forums

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