Many people in the handmade community have this in common with techies: they want to know how things work. In How Does Handmade Spark Get All My Information From Etsy? I tried to explain a little about how APIs work. In that post I mentioned that when you sign up for Handmade Spark we send a message to PayPal using their API.

In this post, I’m going to dig into this a little deeper and talk about what’s actually in that message and how processing credit cards actually works on our site. If you are nervous about using your credit card on our site, maybe this will help put you at ease.

After you enter your credit card into Handmade Spark we send a message to the PayPal API that basically says: “Hey PayPal, we have a new customer, their is name is XYZ, we’d like to bill them $6 per month, and their credit card number is 123.”

Now, even though you have entered you credit card info into our site we never see it. Handling credit cards on the internet is tricky business and sometimes it’s better to work with companies that specialize in it. When your credit card leaves your computer and comes to us we don’t see it and we don’t keep it. Not for one second. It travels using special security technology that also makes it so that people can’t intercept it as it travels across the internet. (You can read all about PCI Compliance here).

We send your credit card information directly to PayPal and what PayPal does with it is insanely complicated. They go thru all kinds of mazes and labyrinths to figure out if you are who you say you are and if they can collect the funds. This process can be really quick, or in some cases, like international payments, it can take several hours. In any event, when it’s done they send us a message saying the payment has been made (or declined). And they repeat this for as long as you are our customer.

Do you have specific questions? Please email us directly at support@handmadespark.com