Credit Card Payment Authorization Form: Fill & Download for Free

As the owner of a local restaurant for 20 years, I can attest this happens to us quite often. You should realize that you, as the guest/customer, have the burden of providing payment. Even if you know there’s money in your credit card/bank account, if my payment processor/payment system terminal is not able to get an authorization on your card, you still have to make some kind of effort to pay for services rendered. In actuality, this has happened quite a few times in recent years as most everyone nowadays pays for nearly everything with credit/debit cards. As an owner of a local business, even though I have a legal right to be paid for the meal you just ate, I don’t wish to embarrass you or cause you to not want to come back to my establishment in the future.My personal way of handling this situation is to first ask if you can utilize some other card or form of payment. Perhaps someone you’re with can pay and you can pay them back later. If all else fails and I am confident that you’re not trying to pull a scam on my restaurant (ie. making false claims that you have funds but you really do not or do not intend to pay), I’ll either ask you to bring cash back later that day or as soon as possible. Realize that if you’re known to us as a regular customer, we already know you and we have no doubt that you'll return ASAP. We also assume you’ll be grateful for our understanding in this situation (assuming your bank or credit card has your account temporarily locked or something). We basically want to get paid for fair services rendered, but we also want to keep you as a happy customer and not have a negative experience and memory of our restaurant. It never hurts to keep some cash tucked away for something like this. It’s a lot less embarrassing to be able to just take care of it for everyone involved.

Like many things in history, it depends on who you ask. The short answer is no one knows exactly for sure. But to qualify to the question's intent, I would limit this to "real time" credit card transactions via a web browser connecting to a website.My memory and direct experience (as a client) tells me that it would be Charles M. Stack's [1], Book Stacks Unlimited "Books.com" [2] business. Started in late 1991 out of Cleveland, Ohio as a Dial-up BBS [3] system, later moved to the Internet via Telnet and later the Web. However, it was really a very long journey to get commerce to this point...One of the earliest images of the Book Stacks Unlimited Logo.Not The Internet- YetWe can exclude the closed dial up services like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and Apple's e•World as these services in the early 1990s were not really fully considered to be on the Internet proper or on the "web" for that matter. These sites along with Dial-up BBS services and the Video Text services in England and France did have transactions take place outside of the subscription services they sold, but it was very limited. This was not really the Internet and from a technical and banking view the roots to this branch of commerce comes from Mail Order merchants.The Explosion Of Mail Order MerchantsFrom the late 1970s - early 1990s Visa and MasterCard slowly began to accept the idea of non face to face transactions with the explosion of Mail Order and Catalog Sales, although it was very hard for even the most well funded businesses to obtain this type of Merchant Account. The physical Credit Card was not designed to allow for non retail transactions, nor were just about all the systems that processed Credit Card transactions. In addition, there was simply not enough of Risk infrastructure in place from a technical level to allow many merchants to have access to this system.It took to the mid 1980s before the credit card networks had a simple machine to allow for Electronic Credit Card Processing. Prior to this, all Credit Cards for Mail Order sales had to be manually processed by calling in the Credit Card number to a live operator that would either look at a paper booklet issued 6 days a week called The Combined Warning Bulletin (HotSheet) or in some cases actually had a computer terminal to check if a card number was valid and was not canceled.Technical ChallengesEven in the early 1990s computer hosted access to Credit Card Networks was limited to very large companies. The vast majority of retail merchants that did accept Credit Cards Electronically was through a standard Credit Card Terminal. And at that time it was usually the Zon Jr. from Verifone. In this era there were some software solutions but they were very hard to integrate and had limited use cases. This did not stop innovation. In fact the first "Square-like" transaction took place on an Apple Newton in 1988 using the Newton Modem connected to a Motorola "Bag Phone". And yes, you signed the screen to confirm the transaction. It just worked...Internet Transactions? The Lawyer Said "..we have a Hornet's nest of problems here"In 1994 I recall trying to explain the principle of an Internet transaction to a reasonably intelligent group of Bankers and bank IT people they had attending the meeting. Most of the time was spent talking about how a computer could even connect to the Internet and I was asked endlessly "Where" the Internet was. There was only one lawyer in the meeting and fortunately he was more interested in other things, but he did raise his head and say "There is no case law and there is no clear Nexus on a transaction held in 'space', we have a hornet's nest of problems here". Even with this, the outcome was positive in the fact I was able to convince some Bankers to accept Internet Businesses, but easy it was not, each deal was a tedious affair. Prior to this we were able to get Merchant Accounts for BBS dial-up Businesses and earlier Internet Businesses as being in the "Mail Order" category, and technically they were. Selling Virtual goods was almost a decade away and that was a completely different Banking journey.Clearly Bankers did not look at the early Internet with kind eyes and took the media stories of the negative side of the Internet's potential to heart. At that time Visa and MasterCard were private companies run by a Membership board composed of the largest Credit Card Issuing Banks. The Member Banks did not see much value in the Internet and did little to encourage early growth.No Merchant Account, No Internet SalesThus to obtain a Merchant Account for the specific purpose to be used on the Internet was nearly impossible through most of the early 1990s. From both a technical standpoint and a from the risk aversion Bankers had with Merchant Accounts in that era. Clearly you could not simply go to a local bank and get approved to do Internet transactions. You needed well informed specialists versed in the technology and the conservative and sometimes elitist banking system. You could count on your hands the people that had this knowladge in these pioneer stages of Internet Commerce, I knew most of them at the time.He Said "I Want To Sell Every Book Ever Published"When Book Stacks Unlimited's Charles M. Stack had his dream of selling every book ever published, he unwittingly pioneered the way for Jeff Bezo's Amazon.com 5 years later. Charles had many pioneer challenges one of them was to get approved for a Merchant Account and then find a way to process the cards through a computer. This was years before Internet Payment Gateways and PayPal.Internet Commerce Before Internet Commerce Was InventedSolutions had to be cobbled together and one solution was to take a Graphical BBS system called RoboBOARD/FX [4] and connect to a unix machine using Perl scripts to make the first real time Telnet/HTML based transactions to take place. This was achieved by connecting RoboBOARD/FX to the Internet and then to simulate a Verifone Zon Jr. Credit Card terminal on a single dial-up line to get real-time authorizations. It was not at all easy and took about 40 seconds on a 300 Baud modem on a PC to perform the transactions serially (only one transaction per modem). Not a problem at the time as there were not that many orders. Most were connecting to the web at 300 Baud so Internet shopping was a slow experience.Encryption? What Encryption?At this point there was absolutely no encryption and credit card numbers were entered into simple web forms in plain text. Some variations of the system actually emailed the order data via simple MIME utilities. Most are surprised to learn that Banks that approved Merchant Accounts for Internet Businesses were no really concerned with the lack of encryption at the time. There were many reasons for this stance and it turns out that history sided with them on this part, there was very little Credit Card fraud in the early days.Even when Marc Andreessen's Netscape developed the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) in 1994 many sites were still using unencrypted systems on the front end and back end of the process and ultimately using Dial-up lines to obtain a credit card authorization. Although there was a lot of talk about "hackers" stealing credit card numbers over the Internet in those days, most of it was in theory at that point. The first real cases of Credit Card fraud sniffing TCP/IP packets for Credit Card number fingerprints did not take place until the late 1990s and at that point most sites used SSL. Sure there were other types of "secure" credit card processing systems proposed and used, but none came close to the simplicity and genius of SSL. This later formed the nucleus of complete Internet commerce systems including Shopping Carts and Payment Gateways like Authorize.net.Charles Starts And Unexpected RevolutionThe mid 1990s produced more early firsts and successes using Credit Card payments spanning from the Pizza Hut Online ordering system in 1994 and the same year one of the first adult merchants began openly marketing VHS tapes. Charles M. Stack stuck with Book Stacks Unlimited for most of the mid 1990s and perhaps was the inspiration to 1000s of early Internet Commerce pioneers. Perhaps even Jeff Bezos helped form his vision of the early Amazon.com concept from Charles.Charles even holds a number of early Internet commerce patents [5]. But like a lot of innovators and pioneers, he did not stay in the spotlight for very long and ultimately what was left of Book Stacks Unlimited was sold to start Barnes and Noble's attempt to compete with Amazon with the purchase of Books.com.One Idea Gave Way To All We See TodayIt is a funny turn of history that one of the very first online commerce ideas, selling Physical Books through the Internet, helped produce arguably the largest and most successful Internet store, Amazon.com.___1. Book Stacks Unlimited2. Charles M. Stack3. Bulletin board system4. RoboBOARD/FX5. http://www.patentstorm.us/inventors/Charles_Stack/1459400.html

I had a meal at Mi Pueblito Restaurant in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Before ordering the meal, I noticed a Mastercard sign on the door. At the end of meal, I presented my Mastercard to pay for meal, but was informed that the POS machine is down, although they normally accept Mastercard. I did not have any cash with me on that day.Based on what I know about Mastercard merchant agreements, I suggested the waitress/cashier call the acquirer bank to perform a voice authorization. However, she has no idea how to do that. She also didn’t speak any English, so she couldn’t do that even if she knew the merchant code (we’d been communicating via Google Translate). Then I suggested an “imprint”, as each merchant is supposed to have an imprint machine when their POS is offline. The cashier does not know where their imprint machine is.Finally I offered a “paper authorization”, and wrote down the following on a piece of paper: “I hereby authorize Mi Pueblito Restaurant to charge my Mastercard number 528891XXXXXXXXXX expiry MMYY fourteen dollars and 75 cents.” followed by my signature and date. The cashier accepted it.I doubted whether the charge could go through, since all I wrote was the credit card number but no CVV code. A week later, I checked my credit card statement and the charge was there. It seems that their manager found a way to charge my card. I still feel bad for forgetting to tip, though.Leaving without paying is theft and thus illegal. “Paper authorization” technically isn't a valid form of payment, but it's legal as long as the cashier agrees to accept it.