When I have my first e-commerce site, I found the information about online credit card purchases more confusing than in any other aspect of marketing on the Internet.
The reason, as it turns out, is that the various organizations offer advise you how to use online payment systems to conflicting interests and in some cases no idea how the systems work together.
The other potentially confusing aspect of online payments is that the entire system includes a range of service providers one item of the entire chain. The real trick is, they all work together.
So I would like to outline the parts and then give you a few suggestions, as you may approach e-commerce system for your company. (There are dozens of ways to do the same thing!)
Internet Merchant Account - To the online payments if you are not physically swipe a credit card, you need an Internet dealer. This account may be covered by your bank or by a variety of companies, such as Merchant Warehouse, offer Internet Merchant Accounts. It is important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your company or business partner, you must get an Internet account, because they are different. This account is also a set-up fee and some% per transaction.
Most banks only merchant accounts for Visa and MasterCard. It is a very good idea to offer American Express and Discover card payments. To do this, you need to get in touch with American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once this information you can download it to your merchant account provider payment processor to process all four cards on the same account.
Virtual terminal - A virtual terminal is an add-on service that comes with your Internet dealer. In this way you can take orders by phone or in person workshop orders and then go to a secure Internet-based website and process the orders in your account.
Secure Payment Gateway - Since Internet traffic is vulnerable to eavesdropping, you need a secure payment gateway allows your customer credit card data, as they place orders. This is another service provider that specializes in secure transaction and takes the secure data and passes them through a secure gateway to your payment processor. You want to make sure that this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would stick with one of the leading gateway providers. These include Authorize.net, VeriSign and bonito There is a fee for this service as well. It is important that you communicate who your gateway provider is at your merchant account providers. They are
If sale of goods that are available for download you also need the so-called real-time processing from your secure processor. This is only a connection, gets a credit card transaction is approved or rejected in real time as a customer order. There is an additional fee for this service.
Shopping Cart - Baskets come in software and hosted service based versions with which your customers buy multiple items for the job and then to the payment system through the fund. This service is very important when you have multiple products on your website. There are some very stable, fully functional shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to ensure that your cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa - ask.
Third Party Processing - There is an alternative solution for the whole puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party under any circumstances, the processing and no merchant account is required. The disadvantage of this approach is that you pay is generally higher than fee per transaction and have limited opportunities to make your customer check-out experience to your site. PayPal, an eBay Company, is the largest supplier of this approach and is a very acceptable way.
A few words of advice
Each piece of e-commerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly fixed price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and setup fees. Start with your bank, but this aspect shop around. Most small businesses should be able to set up a fully functioning, real-time processing site with a shopping cart for less than $ 150/mo (excluding fees per transaction)
Make sure you find out which parts work well together. In other words, if you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real-time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category, you should have no problems.
Copyright 2006 John Jantsch
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