Importing Customer Credit Cards

Handshake allows you to take the credit cards of your customers and securely store them in the app, to be retrieved later when you're ready to bill and ship their orders. But what about the cards you already had on file before you started using Handshake?

You are allowed to import credit card information to your Handshake account except for the actual card numbers and CVVs. You can use these partially-imported cards when writing orders to note which card should be billed for the order without actually needing to have the full card number in Handshake.

The credit card importer works almost identically to the ship-to address importer; on each row you reference your customers either by ID or name (or both) along with the actual card information.

• customer_id is the customer ID, and tells Handshake which customer this card should be attached to. This is the most reliable method of linking a card to a customer.
• customer_name can be used instead of the ID to link an card to a customer. Since it's possible to have two customers with the same name, this is less reliable and Handshake will bail out with an error if it can't figure out which customer a particular name refers to.
• type is the type of the credit card (e.g. Visa, MasterCard etc) and should match one of the card types you have defined in your options.
• last_four, month, and year should all contain only numbers and must be at most 4, 2 & 4 digits long, respectively.
• expiry can be used to provide the card expiry in MM/YY or MM/YYYY format if it's not easy for you to provide the month and year separately. If either the month or year cells are filled in, the expiry cell will be ignored for that row.

Why can't I import full credit card numbers?

The first question is - why do you want to?

Handshake supports storing credit card numbers for the purposes of moving them back into your billing system later, but doesn't actually support charging them. If you already have credit cards on file (probably in your accounting system), then you presumably already have the ability to charge the cards through that other system and therefore there is no benefit to bringing those full numbers into Handshake.

Handshake's credit card storage is completely secure (as per our policy), however, in order to import full card numbers into Handshake, you would have to generate spreadsheets containing them. Since we can only guarantee the security of our servers and not the security of the personal computer you work on to do your Handshake setup, this introduces some risk (that we can't control) that the spreadsheet you generate could fall into the wrong hands if your personal computer is hacked. Even if this is a tiny possibility because you're diligent with your IT security, there is still no point in adding even the smallest risk of this happening when Handshake can't do anything with the full card numbers anyway.