I use a secure credit card payment provider called 'Secure Trading' based in the UK. This is a credit card processing system which uses industry approved secure protocols and links your browser direct to my bank (Royal Bank of Scotland) for card verification/processing.

When you press the 'click to buy' button for a book or CD-Rom, your browser is connected to the Secure Trading system and a secure web page form appears. You should note the padlock icon in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. When you have filled in the form with your name, address, and credit card details and press the 'Make payment now' button, your browser encrypts your details, and sends them by secure encryption to my banker's computer system. This verifies the validity of the card and whether it has sufficient credit to buy the item, then processes the transaction. This can take about 10 to 20 seconds, then if the transaction is successful an acknowledgement page will now appear with details of the order. Your card has at this point been charged. The system then sends you an email with the details of your purchase. At the same time the system sends me an email with the details of your order, name, address, email, but it does not provide me with your credit card number.

You can see that this system entirely protects the customer as the credit card details are not passed on to individual traders like myself and thus not recorded on any insecure system. You can feel entirely safe with this industry approved system. I have been trading with secure servers since December 1996 and none of my customers have had any problems with this. I do pay large fees for this secure system as I wish my customers to feel safe when purchasing items from me.

This means I do not receive your credit card details and do not hold these on file. Your transaction is directly with my banker's computer. For this reason I cannot process a subsequent transaction for you as I do not have your credit card details.

I have opted not to implement a shopping basket on my web site, as this software is expensive and not always easy to use. This means you will have to go to each item and pay for them separately. This is the simplest system and has the advantage of being entirely foolproof - you always know exactly what you are purchasing.

All prices are in UK pounds not in US dollars. When you pay by credit card this is converted automatically by your credit card company. Each company sets their own rates and charges - so I cannot price this in other currencies exactly. I have set up a currency convertor and this will give you an indication of the price you will have charged to your card.