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HOP Around

I recently bought a GPS at Amazon.com and had a great experience shopping online, however found the whole payment process wanting on user experience and security. And to compound it there are at least 7 sites I have my card details saved in, which really makes me nervous.

I felt the payment process had a way to go inspite of PayPal and the recent development in mobile payment options. So I thought up a USB Credit Card Reader as a Home Online Payment Gateway (HOP) with the following high level features:

HOP will consist of a USB reader device, client side software (to be installed on the client) and server side library. The killer option would be to have the card reader built into the laptop or the keyboard although that would require a lot from DELL, HP, Apple etc.

1. The Card Reader will plug into the Laptop or the Desktop through a USB port

2. The reader will have an client installable (including the driver s/w) which will be auto-installed the first time the device is connected.

3. All merchant websites which want to accept HOP Cash will have to include scripts (client side scripts) in their online payment pages which will connect to the payment gateway service.

4. The ecommerce package will have a server side library which supports HOP clients and integrates HOP with the payment gateways.

The basic use case would be as follows

1. The user on checkout is taken to the payments page where she would have the option to select the mode of payment.

2. Once the user selects HOP then the client side script kicks in and requests the user to plug-in the card reader if its not already. If it is already plugged in, the client side scripts auto detects HOP device.

3. The user is instructed to swipe the credit card

4. The client script auto-submits the card info to the server (encrypted)

5. On the server, the server side library is invoked with the card info. This library is responsible for integrating with the payment gateway and complete the transaction.

The commercial aspect of this is to sell or license the client device and the drivers. A good model to follow would be UPEK (http://www.upek.com/) which produces finger print readers for laptops.

I am not an expert on ecommerce payment systems as you might have already guessed, but I think the overall idea is feasible. What do you think??
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