General FAQs

1. What does the Alliance Requester Service do?
   The Alliance Requester Service allows in-house developers, consultants and independent software vendors (ISVs) to connect their company's or their client's applications directly to Alliance via the Internet. The Requester Service allows developers to add transaction creating, editing, reporting, and related functionality to their applications. The Alliance Requester Service can be used with a number of languages including Microsoft Visual Basic, VBScript, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion, JavaScript and more.
   
   
2. How does the Alliance Requester Service communicate?
   The Alliance Requester Service uses the secure Internet protocol, HTTPS, to establish an Internet connection to pass information from an application to the Alliance servers and then back to the application. With one function call your application can establish the connection to Alliance, send and receive information, and terminate the connection.
   
   
3. Do I need an Alliance Merchant Account to begin?
   No, until your Merchant Account is setup, you can begin the development process by using our test/demo servers. After your account has been created, just change the URL and Authentication information to production and you're ready to go live!
   
   
4. Does Alliance certify my application integration?
   At this time Alliance does not have a certification process in place. However, we are working to develop an optional certification for independent software vendors and consultants.
   
   
5. How can I test my application?
   The Alliance system provides developers with a test environment in which transactions can be sent to the without generating actual transactions.
   
   
6. Does Alliance recommend an integrator that I can contract with?
   We have several vendors that have integrated with the Alliance Requester Service. Visit our Integration Partners page for more details.
   
   

Technical FAQs

1. How can I check connectivity to Alliance servers?
   Point your browser to the following URL, https://gateway.allianceach.com/login.aspx. You should see the Gateway Login page.
   
   
2. What is required from my proxy server?
   The Alliance Requester Service communicates over the standard part 443 for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) communications. Generally, no additional ports are needed for connectivity.
   
   
3. Are the transactions secure?
   At Alliance, we are as committed to securing the information about your transactions. All communications with the Alliance production servers are done over SSL with 128-bit encryption.
   
   
4. How are the requests formatted?
   All transmissions to the Requester Service are done using XML. Please download our documentation for exact details and examples.
   
   
5. What OS's and languages does the Requester Service support?
   The Requester Service can communicate with any platform or language that can communicate with HTTP requests and responses that can also generate and understand XML.
   
   
6. Can I use your sample code that is listed on your website?
   The sample code is provided to you for help in developing the product. We do not hold any limitations on using the sample code.
   
   
7. Will you support us through the development of Requester Service?
   Support is provided for the system from 6am to 6pm Pacific Standard time. Assistance will be provided for basic troubleshooting of the Requester Service. The code you write will not be supported by the support team but we will assist with any error messages received from our server or dealing with the connection to our servers.