Accept Credit Card Online

When setting up an e-commerce site, every businessperson will eventually have one important thing to consider: how to get paid. In an electronic business, asking people to send in checks is the same as asking to fail. Accepting PayPal is an option, but doing so often puts the stamp of a tiny business onto a site, undoing all its efforts at looking like an established company. The only true solution to this question – the one that will allow the business to grow to its fullest potential – is to accept credit cards.

To accept credit cards online, one doesn’t have to be a genius at setting up a site. In fact, it’s usually simple, due to the fact that shopping cart software is made with this type of payment acceptance in mind.

In terms of technical requirements, the first thing an e-commerce site needs is shopping cart software. There is a plethora of options for this. The basic things the software needs to be able to do is keep track of what is in a customer’s shopping cart, add up the total plus any tax or shipping costs involved, and allow the customer to enter his or her payment information. Then it must relay this payment information to the credit card processing service.

This is where the business’ merchant account comes in. This account isn’t a checking or savings account; it’s an account set up specifically to accept online credit card transactions. For an online business, it will include payment gateway software rather than a physical terminal. This software is not the kind that gets installed on the merchant’s PC or server. Instead, it resides at a payment processing service, and is accessed online via a secure connection. This allows the shopping cart to automatically send the details to the processor without any manual intervention.

Once the information is at the processor, the rest happens automatically – authorizations, securing the funds from the customer’s charge account, and transferring the funds to the merchant’s bank is all done by the processing company.

It can seem very complicated when first looking at how to accept credit card online transactions, and a lot of activity does indeed happen behind the scenes. For the merchant, however, it is quite simple. The merchant usually only needs to enter its identification information into its cart software, and that software will do all it takes to make the connection with the payment gateway software. The ID information is generated by the payment gateway, and presented in an easy-to-understand format that only needs to be copied and pasted into the administration area of the cart.

Despite the simplicity, it’s always good to run a few test transactions. This will allow the businessperson to see that there are no glitches. If there are any, it is usually easy to find the fix in the cart’s help files.

Once set up, most businesspeople will find that it was easy enough and well worth it to be able to accept online credit card transactions.