For a number of e-Businesses, discovering the best way to accept payments is a frustrating task. As the Internet is an instant medium, it is highly recommended that a e-commerce website must accept credit/debit cards and online checks as modes of payment. In order to accept credit card transactions, you require setting up a merchant account with a merchant bank. As soon as you set up a merchant account, an online processor can provide you with the software or gateway you need to transact.
Selecting a suitable merchant account is considered to be one of the most tough business decisions you make as their existence has almost doubled and are now into more than hundreds. At the time of choosing a merchant account, you should be aware of the cost involved in setting up the account. Refer to the list below and don’t forget to ask about each of these items before agreeing to an account.
Application Fee
The application fee is compulsory so an agent or bank can "research" you as a potential customer. Few firms are more likely to repay this fee if your application is not accepted while others won't. It is always advisable not to pay an application fee that will not be refunded in case you are rejected.
Minimum Account Billing
This fee requires you to do a least amount of business with a merchant bank. A majority of banks require a monthly minimum of at least 25 dollars in transaction fees. Anything less than 35 dollars minimum is satisfactory.
Statement Fee
In case there is a considerable minimum-billing need, then there should be no statement fee. Still, a number of banks charge this to cover administrative costs. If you are assessed a statement fee, it shouldn't exceed 10 dollars per month.
Charge back Fee
In case a customer is not satisfied with their purchase, can't get a refund, or is just looking for something free, you may be faced with a charge back attempt. Under this, the bank will return customer’s fund and debit your account for the full amount. Always make sure to ask about your bank's charge back policy. Most banks tend to be more loyal to cardholders than merchants so protect yourself by preventing charge back fees.
Transaction Fee
This fee, which is usually about 2-3 percent of the purchase, is assessed on every transaction. If a product costs US$100, the bank would receive US$2-3 for their services. While rates are relative to the nature of your business, anticipated volume and your credit history, you should never pay more than 3 percent.
Setup Fee
This covers administrative work necessary to establish your account. In case you're charged an installation or programming fee, there shouldn't be a setup fee. There is a considerable amount of work completed to create merchant accounts, so fees of US$50-500 should be expected.
At the time of approaching banks or an intermediary about a merchant account, always keep in mind the following tips:
1. Read the terms, conditions and anticipated charges carefully. Don't sign anything until your questions are answered to your satisfaction. Take time to understand exactly what you are getting and how much you are paying to get it.
2. Do you require a reserve account? It shouldn't be, but if you are a start-up Internet business, have poor to marginal credit, anticipate low volumes or run a "risk" business, it may be required.
3. How long before funds are available to you? Ideally it should not take more than 72 hours from the time an order or transaction is processed.
Given below are some of the options available with whom you can setup your merchant account.
Paypal: With a free PayPal account one can accept credit cards on your website immediately
Click bank: It offers distribution of digital products and has an instant affiliate network promoting your business.
North American Bancard: It is a full service payment solution provider of Credit, Debit, EBT, Check Conversion and Guarantee, Checks by Phone & Net.
How To Choose A Merchant Account
E-business strategy vital for e-commerce web solutions
Though there are a number of e-commerce web solutions in the market, what makes your e-commerce venture stand out from the thousands of other such ventures on the Internet and fetch you a high Return on Investment is your e-business strategy. If you have your e-business strategy neatly defined, it would be easier for you to choose your customized e-commerce solution.
Depending upon your ebusiness strategy, website developers develop for you
e-commerce web solutions that suit your business best. Choose a developer who has plenty of experience as an ebusiness solution provider in developing successful e-commerce websites that include sites geared towards selling specific Products or Services, Dating sites, Auction sites, Social Networking sites, to name a few.
A good e-commerce web site design would provide: (1) a 'Unified Storefront' that is a well-displayed showcase of products (2) a 'Shopping Cart System' where you place your selected products (3) a system that integrates your online data transactions and e commerce payment solutions with your existing accounting system and (4) a fine-tuned Search option to locate just the kind of product you want.
A successful e-commerce web site design should have an intuitive and user-friendly control panel enables administrators to manage the webstore and sales — whether it's membership, product or service purchases. It should have a system for keeping records of returning customer profiles, allowing them to retrieve and re-order from previous orders, speeding up the process.
E-commerce web development should also focus on database driven website design to allow business websites the ability to create additional value for their users and add functionality that retains customers. It provides an easy mechanism for collecting information about customers.
For developing a profitable e business auction site, there are a set of vitally important power-packed options and tools you should have. For instance, your should have a full Admin Area to exercise complete control over the web-site (2) Multiple Payment Modules (3) the option to run your site as Private Or Public Site and (4) a complete Auction Interface.
Besides, there is a complete strategy working behind it to make your presence felt in the huge auction marketplace even if you are running not a whole auction site but say an e-Bay store. And impressive eBay web design can double sales in incredibly short period of time. You need a professional eBay Stores Designer who would help you create a successful store right from the logo and layout to setting up categories and sub categories and advise you on the proper text and keywords to use in your SEO eBay store.
Orient InfoSolutions is a leading IT solutions provider that specializes in creating customized e-commerce solutions for you based on sound e-business strategy. It provides flexible e-commerce web solutions to setup and run an online business with real-time credit card processing and secure online transactions. The solutions are engineered in a way to serve as your very own ebusiness strategist. You can visit OrientInfoSolutions.com for some indepth and comprehensive information of highly effective e-commerce web solutions.
eCommerce Web Site Building: Where Do I Start?
Building a web site isn't something that is really cut and dry. There's a huge variety of products and services that can either help you get your web site where you want it or simply confuse you. It's also important that you make the right choices upfront so that you don't end up having to restructure your whole web site because of some problem in your design layout. The level of time investment neccessary for mastery in a lot of these software packages can range from little to a VERY significant amount. Because of this I feel it's important to be lead in the "right" direction to make sure you don't spend time in the wrong areas, or learning some software that might not be all that useful for you later on (*coughs* Frontpage *coughs*).
Where you should start greatly depends on what you plan on attempting to do, and how deep you're going to dive in. For a moderately professional, clean looking web site without a lot of automation or intensive animated graphics you can probably get by with some basic knowledge of html, ability with a good WYSIWYG editor, and an image editting program. On the other hand, if you're someone that's looking to build something that will really wow your audience then you might consider spending some major time and developing some animation skills with a program like Macromedia Flash. I personally always spring for what I believe will bring me the greatest amount of profit with a minimal amount of effort, and because of this I usually end up spending all of my time diving in deeper with ONLY my WYSIWYG HTML editor, and my image editor.
## What is a "WYSIWYG" editor? ##
A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is what allows you to get by with minimal knowledge of HTML. Yes, that means you don't have to know EVERYTHING about HTML to have a decent looking website. When you use a WYSIWYG editor it interprets what you're doing (inserting an image for example) as being a certain series of HTML tags with attributes, and does it for you... Thus, what you see on your screen is what you get. Instead of seeing a bunch of HTML code in text format, you'll mostly see what will actually show up in your browser once your web site is up WHILE you're making it. I highly recommend using the latest version of dreamweaver -- it is well-known as one of the best HTML editors by general consensus. Dreamweaver's interface is very friendly, has a built in FTP client, and is specifically built to be flexible enough to suit both the coder and the everyday amatuer webmaster.
## Image editing? What do I need that for? ##
Okay, let's be realistic here: If you're going to make a professional *appearing* web site it's important that you can make some basic, decent looking graphics. There's a lot of graphics problems that can truly get the job done, but as far as power and flexibility goes I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop definitely takes some time getting used to, but in the end it's VERY rewarding. I've ended up using my knowledge of Photoshop to make not only graphics for multiple web sites, but also touched up portraits, made business cards, flyers, and other online advertisments such as banners. Infact, I've used it for everything except animation... But it also comes with Adobe Imageready which is very good with animation. This software is amazing, and if you're going to learn ANY image editing software I recommend you start with Photoshop because of it's widerange of overall... usefulness!
## Let's get me some sales! ##
Kick off your new web site you've gotten up from your knowledge of webmastering and image editing with a few new sales... Sounds like a plan? Well a great way to do that quickly is with pay-per-click advertising. BUT WAIT! Doesn't that cost money? Well... Yes. But with the tools brought to us by some of the biggest pay-per-click advertisers out there we should be able to make a good evaluation of how much profit we're going to make without much investment upfront.
The big question behind pay-per-click advertising is whether or not it's worth the cash when you can simply get traffic from regular search engine ranking (otherwise known as organic traffic). Afterall, there are plenty of companies out there that promise to help get you all the traffic you need through optimizing your web site for organic ranking. The answer to this question is quite simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools such as those offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords anyone can calculate exactly what their profit is after cost of PPC advertising is taken out. In my opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among the PPC advertisers. Google Adword's interface makes it very easy to see which keywords are pulling you in the most sales, and which ones aren't even worth your advertising money.
Let us not forget, however, that in order to make those conversions we're going to be needing a shopping cart! There's a lot of diverse software packages out there you can use, but I've been using Mal's E-Commerce Free shopping cart for a number of years with great success. The cart's server is hosted on their machines so that means you not only get away with not having to pay for the software itself, but you get out of having to buy an SSL security ticket too! Nothing's a better bargain than free, eh?
## Getting those sales leads you've been building up to BUY! ##
Once you've scored a few sales it would probably be a good idea to start using some kind of lead management services. I highly recommend the use of autoresponders for this purpose. Autoresponders are, essentially, a newsletter sign-up that allows you to strategically determine what you want to send each lead after a certain alotted amount of time. For example, let's say someone visits your web site and you offer them a free newsletter. If you were selling an ebook on some very complicated topic, you might consider sending them only information on the most basic concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn those visitors that might have left your web site and never have returned into some serious revenue!
As far as autoresponders go, I highly recommend the use of Aweber. Their customer service is superb (seriously, these guys really know their stuff!) and can be contacted at any point during the business day via online chat or phone. They also offer tons of free information, and guides on making the most of their services. Check out their month long free trial at http://www.getaweber.com/
Create your Free e-commerce website at: wix
Introduction To Ecommerce
Many people new to websites and/or ecommerce are confused at the in and outs of ecommerce. Even many people who are fairly adept at scripting can set up a store using some popular package such as OSCommerce and then are left stumped by the idea of making it work with a payment gateway to actually collect money and put it into their account. In this article, I will give a brief overview of how the system is set up to collect your money. I will then discuss briefly what to look for in evaluating payment gateways. As usual, I will keep this basic and understandable just as I do with all of my articles.
The Basics - How Funds are Collected
Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the site owner's perspective, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank. In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway. This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds. The payment gateway will then report back a successful transaction to the merchant, at which point the merchant's shopping cart system will respond by displaying a "Thank You" type message to the buyer. Funds will sit until the transaction is settled, which means the funds are collected and deposited to your bank account. Until a transaction is settled, the transaction will not post to your bank account and the corresponding debit will not post to the buyer's credit card account.
Merchant Accounts
A Merchant Account is a special type of account specifically for online retailers. They are designed to allow non-POS (point of sale) transactions using credit cards, or transactions where you don't have the person's credit card in hand. In other words, you don't have a card swiper. A merchant account is not the same as a bank account. It acts as a go-between between your payment gateway and your bank account, accepting funds from credit cards which are then deposited into your bank.
A merchant account is a relationship based on trust between you and the issuing bank. The bank takes funds from the buyer's account and deposits into your account. A payment processor takes care of checking for availability of funds and debiting from the credit card account. The bank issuing the merchant account is trusting that you will fulfill your end of the transaction by providing the product or service that the buyer purchased. In case where this does not occur, the buyer can dispute the transaction. This puts the issuing bank on the line because they are then obligated to return the funds to the buyer's card (a chargeback). Therefore, merchant providers are taking a risk in allowing a merchant to take credit cards under their name.
The organization providing your merchant account will do underwriting on the account when you apply to check your credit. If you have a history of too many chargebacks, you may be denied. In fact, too many chargebacks can result in you, as a merchant, being put on the Terminated Merchant File (also called The Match File). This is a blacklist which will effectively prevent you from ever receiving a merchant account again.
Payment Gateways
A payment gateway serves as the front end to your merchant account, allowing you to manage funds, transactions, and the like. It also serves as a connection between your website and your merchant account. It takes data submitted via your secure order forms and presents it to your processing bank. The processing bank then approves or declines the transaction and sends its response back to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then turns around and provides this data back to the merchant for appropriate handling of the transaction. A payment gateway, then, does not offer services such as merchant accounts or shopping carts, although some of the larger-known gateways do provide such options as value-added services.
Some of the better known payment gateway services are Authorize.Net, Verisign, 2CheckOut.com, Linkpoint, Paysystems.com, Worldpay.com, and MerchantCommerce. Some of the things to look for in a payment gateway are compliance with CISP, SDP and DISC (security initiatives put out by the major credit card companies), virtual terminal (to be able to accept transactions over the phone by typing in their data rather than only relying on your website), fraud prevention, recurring billing, methods of integration, cost and whether they can accept e-checks or not.
Fraud prevention is a big one because, as stated above, too many fraudulent transactions will result in chargebacks which could end up putting you on the Match List and your merchant account closed. Some of the common fraud detection mechanisms are Address Verification (AVS) which compares the customer's address with that on file with the issuing bank, CVV2 which makes use of the 3-digit security code on the credit card (4-digit on American Express cards).
Most gateways will provide instructions on how to interface with their servers from your web store. Most gateways offer two methods of integration.
One method is to have your site POST a form to the gateway's server which is pre-populated with your customer's information. At that point, the customer will provide the customer with the payment form which allows them to type in their credit card number in a secure environment. After processing occurs, the customer is then routed back to your website along with the results of the transaction. Your site again takes over the process. This method is usually easier to set up for site owners and it also means the site owner does not need to purchase their own SSL certificate (allowing secure transactions on the site itself). The tradeoff is that you do need to send your customers off of your website for payment collection. Many gateways offer ways to make the payment form look like your website using customized headers and footers, but the fact remains that the visitors are leaving your website.
The second method is totally invisible to the customer. If the site owner has an SSL certificate, they can set up security on their own site. This means they can host the payment form themselves, totally customizing it to their website. When the customer submits payment, your site will securely and invisibly submit the information to the payment gateway. The payment gateway will do the usual processing and then invisibly send the response back to the merchant's website, allowing it to respond properly. From the customer's perspective, they never left your website. And they never did. This type of setup requires an SSL certificate as well as access to the CURL library.
Many gateway providers can get you set up with a merchant account at the same time as the gateway. So, in most cases, you do not need to sign up for them separately.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has given you a brief introduction to how credit card payments are processed on the internet.
The ClickBank E-Commerce Solution
ClickBank.com can offer you multiple solutions for your e-commerce business. Here are some of the advantages of using ClickBank.
1. Accept Credit Cards Without a Merchant Account
If your product is downloadable (such as electronic books or software), ClickBank may be an excellent solution for you. For a $49.95 initial fee, you can process credit cards and on-line cheques for $1.00 per transaction plus 7.5% of sales.
2. Start Your Own Affiliate Program
With ClickBank, you have your own built-in affiliate program. You decide what commission (from 1% to 75%) you would like to pay your affiliates.
To learn more about ClickBank.com, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/buy/clickbank.html
3. Receive Free Advertising
You receive additional exposure through free listing on the ClickBank website and through the search facilities of other websites, such as CBMall.com.
To learn more about CBMall.com, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/buy/cbmall.html
4. Obtain Referral Commissions
Even without applying for ClickBank credit card processing, you can earn referral commissions on thousands of ClickBank Marketplace products.
To learn more about ClickBank Marketplace, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/buy/clickbank-marketplace.html
5. Eliminate Sales Tax Problems
Are you registered for Value Added Tax (VAT) for online transactions for European Union (EU) countries since July 1, 2003?
Are you collecting the appropriate state or provincial sales taxes?
If you are a Canadian, are you aware of your obligation to collect Goods and Services Tax (G.S.T.) and Harmonized Sales Tax (H.S.T.) on Internet transactions?
Again, ClickBank may be your solution. ClickBank is registered for EU purposes and adds the appropriate VAT to each transaction.
As well, to deal with ClickBank, you must agree to sell your product to them. ClickBank then resells your product to their customers. Thus, ClickBank becomes the retailer responsible for collecting sales taxes -- not you. Obviously, ClickBank will not be subject to sales taxes in most jurisdictions.
Since ClickBank is located in the United States and can only sell or use the products it sells from there, it would appear that Canadian G.S.T. and H.S.T. would not be applicable to them.
Of course, this is not legal advice. To determine your liability for sales and similar taxes, consult your lawyer and accountant.
To read more about sales taxes on Internet transactions, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/e-commerce-tax.html
Considering its many advantages, ClickBank may well be your e-commerce solution!
Resource Box: J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc., http://www.popeconsultinginc.com/ has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twenty-five years.
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