When paying online with any type of card, do vendors see all the numbers or just parts of it?

All the numbers.

Hiding them is so people looking over your should can’t see them

They have to see all of the numbers so your account can be charged.

Yep. As an eCommerce Web Developer, I can assure you they need all the particulars, Name on the card, All the numbers, in many cases the CVV number from the back, and the expiration date. Without full info, they can’t capture funds through to their Merchant Bank. So it behooves you to know the reputation of online vendors before placing a credit card order with them.

Whatever service is being used to run the credit card obviously has to know all the numbers. But if you’re buying a product from someone and they’re using a card reader to run your card, that person will not have your full card number.

I use Square to run cards for my business. I never have access to any of my customers full card info, if the card goes through it tells me its authorized and shows the last 4 digits and the card logo. Square does so they can run the card and then send me my money and take their little percentage of my sale. But I will never have the full info. Same goes for other portable card readers that my friends use for their businesses.

Same goes when people pay me with a card through Paypal. I don’t see the card number, Paypal does.

Well, there’s having the computer have the numbers and then there’s have a person see the numbers. The computers can capture the information and then pass it on without showing it to a live person. It’s possible. Indeed, I don’t know why any person would be interested in seeing the numbers, unless they didn’t work.

So I seriously doubt any person actually looks at the card numbers. There’s no need to.

Now if you are worried about fraud, then yes, any vendor could look through their list of credit card numbers and resell them or use them for identity theft. There is no way around this. Either you trust vendors to respect your data, or you don’t use a credit card.

According to Ebay, when paying with paypal, the seller won’t ever see your credit card info. So this is why I was wondering.

Ebay is different. They handle the credit cards on behalf of vendors, and it is true that the vendors never see the numbers. PayPal transfers the funds into the vendors accounts.

@AshlynM If you pay an online site with PayPal (not your PayPal Master Card) then the transaction gets forwarded to PayPal and you log in securely there. Just be sure that the address bar says you are on https://www.paypal.com/ and not any other site. If you are on PayPal and use your PayPal account funds, there is no CC number involved. If you use one of your Bank credit cards, then PayPal sees the card info including the full number.