With the advent of the internet and online electronic commerce (e-commerce), financial transaction programs that allow users to seamlessly purchase products, transfer and receive funds over an internet connection have been in high demand.
Traditional methods of executing financial transactions have been limited to a user providing his or her credit card, debit card, or checking account number on a commercial website, or using checks, money orders and other forms of paper-based payments. However, these means of executing financial transactions are often cumbersome, slow, and inconvenient, requiring a user to remember a multitude of account numbers, login data and passwords. This often results in significant time delays for payment processing. Furthermore, security and fraud concerns are prevalent. For instance, a user is often reluctant to provide sensitive credit card or debit card information over an internet connection, regardless of how “secure” an internet connection claims to be.
Recent financial transaction programs have emerged as a means for a user to pay for purchases, transfer money, receive money (if the user is a merchant), store shipping addresses, and set up multiple financial accounts (e.g. checking or savings, credit card, debit card) all with one single login and password. Security and fraud concerns are also mitigated by means of online financial security precautions, encryption methods, and anti-phising programs that are inherent in online, internet-based financial transaction systems.
Merchants may decide to use such a financial transaction program in order to receive funds from customers who purchase products from their commercial websites. There are several “payment mechanisms” that enable merchants to receive funds from customers. For instance, certain mechanisms enable customers to enter their credit card, debit card or go to an external login site to enter their account information, pay for the product, and then proceed to checkout.
However, it is difficult for merchants to integrate these payment mechanisms without significant experience with the associated application programming interface (API) or knowledge of computer code. Merchants or vendors have to understand the API, have to know how to code in the specific provided language (i.e. ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, Java, PHP) and have to know how to develop complicated code that interfaces with a plurality of servers and databases during an online financial transaction between a customer and a merchant.
Currently, there are no user-friendly programs that present a simple contextual page flow and that also simultaneously generate the necessary code to integrate into a merchant's commercial website.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a simple, user-friendly and customizable method and system that allows a merchant to seamlessly integrate payment mechanisms inherent to financial transaction programs into their commercial websites, without having to know an API library or the details of a particular code (i.e. ASP, JSP, PHP, .Net, Java).