When starting any business, be it online, brick and mortar or brick and click, requires some sort of point of sale process. When you have a brick and mortar store front, you may just need a cash register and credit card machine. However, when you open online stores, you have the need for something a little different. Here, you need a payment gateway to function at your best.
An effective payment gateway provides the connection from the little “submit order” button on your website to your merchant account. It allows your business, big or small to accept credit cards and online checks as payment types. It does this quickly and hopefully at no additional expense.
Another feature that the payment gateway offers is secure transactions. In today’s identity theft abundant world, this is on everyone’s mind. A good payment gateway will encrypt the credit card number and other personal information on it’s way to the payment server. After the payment server accepts or declines the transaction, it will send back to the website an authorization number for the approval or a declined message if rejected. This entire communication takes about 2-3 seconds. A merchant will then send all of his approved transactions to his merchant account and payment usually arrives in 2-3 days.
So where do I, as a new business owner get this magical payment gateway? That’s the good news, many companies offer this software bundle. It comes with the shopping cart program that allows customers to pick and choose what they want to buy 24 hours a day, and pay for it safely and securely with their credit cards. If you’re going to have an online store, it’s imperative that you have this software program as a part of your website assessment.
An additional feature that some payment gateways offer is the ability to take a phone order too and process the credit card payment with the customer on the phone. The software provides you with an order entry website that you’re able to access via the Internet. The last thing you want to happen is that a customer call you up, ask you a question, want to place an order and you have to re-direct them back to your website. No, you want to be able to take that payment right then and there.
Learn more about a superior payment gateway. You can find out all about merchant account services and how we can help your Internet business.
