As you may know, Congress passed anti-money laundering legislation, otherwise known as the Patriot Act, after the events of 9/11. The passage of the Patriot Act made it incumbent on 2Checkout to bolster our internal monitoring programs and implement Know Your Customer (KYC).

Know your customer (KYC) is the due diligence that 2Checkout must perform to identify our vendors and to ascertain relevant information pertinent to doing financial business with them.

What does this mean for you? When you open a 2Checkout account, we will ask you for information that will allow us to identify you. This may include but is not limited to: requests for copies of your driver’s license, passport, or other identifying documents. We may also ask for you to complete a ‘risk document; a form that allows us to gather additional information about you and your business.

If you have been asked to provide us with such documentation, you may send them to us either by attaching them in response to our email request, or you may fax them to our secure machine at 614-921-2451 Attention: Risk.

2Checkout’s privacy policy assures the security of your information.

We’re excited about all the improvements to our service coming in 2008 and we’ll be telling you more about those as they approach. Today though, we’d like to tell you about some of the updates to the site you’re reading now.

We’ve made a lot of little changes to the colors and layout, but the biggest changes are to the functionality. If you look at the navigation tabs above, you’ll notice we’ve removed the “Forums” tab and replaced it with a “Community” tab. The new Community page includes all of the original forums content and categories, but introduces a lot of improvements. Now, when you post a new thread, the body of that post appears on the community page, so others won’t need to click on the title to read what you’ve written.

Comments have been greatly improved. The responses to Community threads, like those here on the home page are now nestable. If you want to reply to a specific comment, just click the “reply here” link that appears immediately below the comment you want to respond to and your reply will be nested under that comment.

Now, when you post a thread to the new Community page, we have the ability to promote it to the home page. If you want to write an article for the 2Checkout.com home page, the Knowledge Base or our new Tutorials section, just submit it to the Community and if we like it, we’ll move it to the home page.

We hope you enjoy the new site and look forward to many more improvements to our service and this site throughout 2008.

Due to popular demand, PayPal funded 2CO orders will now appear in our suppliers’ Mark Shipped interface.

This means you may see previously fulfilled orders here, so please mark them as shipped as you would with any other order. This will not re-bill previously fulfilled orders, but will remove them from the interface.

Please treat any new PayPal funded 2CO orders appearing in the Mark Shipped interface as you would any other order.

Related Articles:

• How do I mark orders as shipped?
• When is the customer’s card actually charged?
• How do sales authorizations work?

2007 saw a lot of changes here at 2Checkout.com. We added new payment methods, including PayPal (including Pay Later) and FX Source, added new payment options like Foreign Currency Electronic Funds Transfer (FCEFT) and Payoneer and implemented the new account-level demo mode selector. We also launched the new community-based website you’re reading now.

This new site was created to foster communication between 2CO, our suppliers, customers and the public at-large. For the first time, we opened our forum up to the public. We also added this blog and the ability to comment on articles and search the entire site.

From providing our developers’ release notes to asking what you want from an integrated affiliate program, we’ve provided more information and requested more input than ever before.

Coming in 2008, you’ll soon see a redesigned 2CO community site that will allow for even greater communication. There are also going to be a number of new features and improvements to our supplier services. Keep your eyes on this blog for announcements as they become available.

We’d like to give a big “thank you” to our suppliers and customers for making 2007 such a great year and invite you to join us for an even better 2008.

As of January 1, 2008, Cyprus will be adopting the Euro (EUR) as its local currency. Because of this, our Cypriot suppliers must update their banking information via the Banking Wizard to prevent delays in payment.

UPDATE (12/20): Due to the New Year Holiday, payments issued on December 27, 2007 to Cyprus must be in Euro. Please make the necessary changes to your Bank Wizard to prevent delays in receiving future payments.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

More information about this change:

• Central Bank of Cyprus: Euro Introduction
• National Website for the euro