An eCommerce Primer
Before e-commerce Copyright 2006 John Jantscher Many small business owners is the need to accept credit card payments for products and services offered on its website. When you created the first e-commerce site the information that I found on online purchases with a credit card to be more confusing than any other aspect of online marketing. The reason is that the various organizations that offer advice on how to set the payment options on-line to a conflict of interest and, in some cases, no idea of how the systems work together. The other aspect that might cause confusion for online payments is that the whole system involves a number of service providers of each element of the whole chain. The real trick is to work alongside them. Let me outline the parts and then give you some tips on how you might approach a system of e-commerce business. (There are dozens of ways to do the same thing!) Internet Merchant Account – In order to take payments online, if not physically swipe a credit card, you must have an Internet merchant account. This account may be issued by your bank or a number of companies, such as the sale of stocks, which offer Internet merchant accounts. It is important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your store or business, obtain an Internet account, because they are different. This account includes a number of taxes and certain% transaction fee. Most banks offer only market for Visa and MasterCard. It 'a good idea to offer American Express and payment options with credit card Discover. To do this you must contact American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once you have this information you can provide your merchant account provider, payment processor to process all four cards on the same account. Virtual Terminal – A virtual terminal is a complementary service that comes with your Internet merchant account. This allows you to take orders by telephone or in-person workshop orders and then go to a secure website and process orders in your account. Payment Gateway – Since Internet traffic is likely to hear calls for a secure payment gateway that allows your customer's credit card data to be sure your order. This is another service provider specializing in ensuring the functioning and security of data and passes through a gateway security for the payment processor. Want to make this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would like to continue with a major supplier of gateways. This includes Authorize.net, VeriSign and adverts, there is a fee for this service, as well. It 'important to communicate the gateway to your merchant account provider to provider. If you are selling products that are available for immediate download will also have what is known as real-time, secure processing of your processor. This is simply a connection that a transaction has been approved or denied credit card in real time as a customer places an order. There is an additional charge for this service. Shopping – come into trucks and hosted versions of software-based services to enable its customers to purchase more items and then go to their system of payment by way of payment and shipping. This service is very important if you have several products available on its website. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some important systems include the osCommerce shopping cart, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that it is necessary to make sure that the basket is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa – just ask. Serving others – There is no alternative solution for the whole puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party supplier that can provide the processing and no merchant account is required. The disadvantage of this approach is that often pay a higher fee per transaction and have a limited ability to verify your customer experience to match your site. PayPal, an eBay group company, is the main supplier of this approach and is an acceptable solution. A word of advice every piece of the puzzle e-commerce has a fee as a fixed price monthly or per transaction. Be sure to understand what are the taxes. Online merchant account providers are known to the application of high load and set-up fees. Start with your bank, shop, but on this point. Most small business owners must be able to create a functioning real-time processing of the site with a shopping cart for less than $ 150/mo (not including transaction fees) Be sure to identify which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a cart or payment processing to ensure that its integration with the payment gateway in real time and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category should have no problem.