NebulaPay

Payment Processing for
Pick Business Application Software

Introduction

NebulaPay facilitates the addition of payment processing features into Pick-based, MultiValue business application software. With NebulaPay, it's fast and easy to handle credit and debit cards for Point Of Sale merchants, restaurants, web sites, or any place where people take orders or collect payment.

NebulaPay handles card swipes and manual entries, and can process transactions securely over the internet in less than 2 seconds!

Supported Transactions

• Process Credits and Debits in the United States for all major cards and banks
• Void-Sale, Return, and Void-Return
• Gratuities, Pre-Authorizations, Gratuity Adjustments
• Voice Authorization with subsequent posting
• In Development for near-term release:
• Pre-Paid / Gift Cards
• Electronic Benefits Transfers (EBT) (Government programs, Foodstamps)
• Address Verification Service (AVS) (Sales and Auth-Only)
• Get the best rates for certain categories of merchants, such as MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order), catalogs, internet, or when the transaction occurs without the card and cardholder present.
• Check Authorization with valid ID
• Ask us about support for Canadian Debit cards in English or French
• Tell us what transactions you require!

Reporting and Batching Administration

• Secure website to view selected detail and summary transactions
• Batch Summary and Item Detail transactions
• Automatic and Manual Closing of Batches

• Multiple servers, nationwide, separate backbones, virtually guaranteed uptime unless there is a total blackout.
• 24/7 support of the connectivity and transaction integrity through our partners.
• Free on-line reporting for merchants.
• Check verification through industry-standard services makes accepting a check from anyone with a valid ID as safe as accepting cash. Merchants are guaranteed to receive 100% of the face value of checks returned from authorizing banks.
• Free updates to support Electronic Benefits Transfers, gift cards and other features.
• Documentation and assistance for network and telephone configurations.

How Much Does NebulaPay Cost?

NebulaPay is Free to MV VARs. There are no sign-up fees, initial purchases, or maintenance or support fees for USA merchants. No one gets a bill from us for related software or services - and we might even be saving people money. In fact, VARs get paid to use NebulaPay.

We help to negotiate transfer from a merchant's existing payment provider to ours, for a rate that is equal to better than what the merchant has now. The merchant never notices a change unless they're saving money. A commission from the standard processing fees is then split between the VAR and Nebula R&D. Everyone benefits and there are no extra costs to merchants, consumers, or developers. Note again that we draw our fees from industry-standard rates - there are no markups and the merchant and VAR enjoy all the features and benefits while saving and even making money.

We reserve the right to modify our model in the future. Canadian merchants follow a different model and services differ, though the software is the same.

Our business model is very versatile and can be customized to the needs of each VAR and merchant. If you have questions about our business model or would like to discuss how to save the merchant even more money, please feel free to contact us.

Why Do it Yourself?

Some developers say they can write their own payment processing interface, but:

• What happens when something breaks locally or on the LAN or WAN?
• How do you recover from hung processes?
• How do you support multiple Pick platforms and the various ways they do communications?
• Can you support both Windows and Linux/Unix?
• Can you process transactions in 2 seconds or less?
• How familiar are you with the details required for each transaction type?
• What about reporting?
• Will you be able to handle all of the transaction types required for your end-users?
• Do you really want to get into this side-specialty?
• Wouldn't you rather get paid to use software that's already written and supported?

Architecture

All of the NebulaPay transaction functions are invoked from the business application with a call to a single program. This program initiates a call to a server process running on the local PC or another PC on-site. That server process then makes the connection to the internet-based payment processing servers. With the proper router installed, if the internet connection fails a telephone dialup can transparently keep transactions flowing.

Performance and Reliability

We realize that when we're handling financial transactions, speed and stability are absolutely critical. For this reason NebulaPay is built upon a unique architecture which can utilize multiple server processes on a system, multiple systems in a site, and multiple payment processing servers on the internet.

Average transaction time from NebulaPay to the internet based payment processing servers is 2 seconds or less. Why is this important? Consumers are very likely to leave a store rather than wait in long lines. Statistics show that some merchants can achieve a $1000 increase in sales per week, depending on size and volume, if they can eliminate long lines and retain the interest of walk-in customers. (We wonder if those statistics include customers coming back due to satisfaction, or lost business due to negative word-of-mouth.)

Because of this, NebulaPay recognizes network problems like down or slow servers, and will fail over to new processes - and even start new server processes to accommodate demand. While some payment handling software takes 20 seconds for a single transaction, if NebulaPay ever takes 20 seconds you can be sure that there were a number of recovery mechanisms that automatically activated in order to get the transaction through. And once a clear path is found to the payment processor, other processes follow the same and new paths, to keep them from hitting the known trouble spots.

Supported Environments

NebulaPay is currently supported for D3 and mvBASE. Support for jBASE, Universe, and Unidata are in development. Other MV platforms will be supported on request. The MV application can run over any OS including Windows and Linux.

NebulaPay is currently available to merchants based in the United States. Any international VAR/VAD can develop with NebulaPay but only for USA end-users. At this time, only Debit transactions are supported in Canada under a different business model - please call for details.

NebulaPay uses OpenSSL encryption for local data transmission. This is easily turned off and can be substituted with alternative encryption methods. Nebula R&D does not distribute OpenSSL outside of the USA due to regulations regarding export of encryption technology, but we do provide documentation for its use.

© 2007 Nebula Research and Development