Payment Processors
One of the most common questions we are asked is regarding
payment processors. These are companies that essentially serve
as a gateway between the World Wide Web and your bank account.
Payment Processors usually provide a number of ways for you
to accept payments from your website and then get access to that
money online or have it transferred to the merchant account of
your selected bank. These include very simple solutions and more
complex implementations.
There are thousands of payment gateway solutions and oftentimes
the best ones are offered by the larger companies. When incorporating
a payment gateway with an e-commerce store, security is of prime
concern and needs to be considered carefully.
While the solutions are many, we usually recommend going with
known and trusted entities to handle your e-commerce transactions.
Two solutions stand out as being well known but are essentially
very different from one another.
Paypal
Standard -
Paypal is one of the easiest solutions to implement to start
accepting credit cards on your website. They do not require a
merchant account and for individuals and small stores Paypal
may prove to be the quickest and most cost effective way to
online commerce.
Paypal takes a percentage of each transaction processed thru
their system. The fees vary depending on the amount processed.
The higher the amount processed, the lower the percentage of
the transaction they charge. Paypal does not charge a monthly
fee for using their system. So if do not sell anything within
the monthly cycle or you decide to temporarily close your store,
you will not be charged anything for having a Paypal account.
This benefit is not true of most real merchant accounts.
One drawback to the Paypal solution is visitors are
redirected to the Paypal site in order to submit payments. This
does not present itself as the most professional way of processing
credit cards. However, Paypal
is a common and well known solution that millions
of websites now implement.
In
order to setup a free Paypal account, visit Paypal here.
Paypal
Pro - This is a new service that Paypal is now
offering that makes them much more like a regular payment
gateway with the added benefit of having a virtual terminal
that allows you to take credit cards over the phone.
With this Paypal offering one can keep all their payment solutions
under one roof. It also allows for people to process credit cards
right from their own website without having to send them to Paypal
first. In order to benefit you will have to find a shopping cart
that supports Paypal Pro or use a shopping cart service that
supports Paypal Pro. The first stand-alone shopping
cart that supported Paypal Pro out of the box was ClickCartPro.
In order to setup a free Paypal account, visit Paypal
here.
Authorize.net -
One of the largest payment gateways on the web, Authorize.net
is a complete solution to accepting credit card payments for
online commerce. It requires a merchant account and will take
a few days before your ready to do transactions. They
have programs where they assist customers in setting up merchant
accounts that will work with their system. This solution is very
powerful because in essence it is much the same as a regular
store that accepts payments via a merchant account.
Authorize.net charges a
monthly fee and a per transaction fee. So unless you are planning
on selling a good amount of product, it may prove to be too costly
as you have to pay the monthly fee regardless of whether you
actually sell anything or not.
The most advanced solution provided by Authorize.net is called
AIM (Advanced Integration Method). This allows for entire transactions
to be completed from your website without the visitor being redirected
to the payment processor. This is similar to most large stores
on the Internet such as Amazon.com.
The visitor shops and purchases from the store website. They
are not redirected to any other entity in order to process payments.
The AIM process works like this. The online visitor
enters all their order details including CC numbers, shipping
address, billing address, and any other necessary details right
from your website. Upon submitting the order an encrypted message
is sent invisibly to Authorize.net. This message contains all
the details necessary to charge the visitors credit card. Upon
submission Authorize.net quickly goes to work on the information
checking for possible fraud and other necessary tasks so as
to successfully charge the card. If nothing is abnormal about
the submission (card isn't expired, stolen, card number matches
billing address, and other protection methods) the charge is
posted on the card. At this point Authorize.net sends an encrypted
secure response back to your website which then informs the user
about their order being processed successfully. This all happens
in a matter of 1 to 5 seconds! If the charge is not successful,
an encrypted response is sent back to the website and the visitor
is alerted that something is wrong with their order. This could
be a bad credit card number, a credit card over its limit,
an expired card, or other abnormalities that perhaps were unintentional
but the online visitor did not recognize. Often times they
simply need to check their entries for typos which can be common.
Upon correcting any potential problems, they can
resubmit the order for another attempt at charging their card
or an alternative card if they decide to use a different credit
card account.
There are many other payment processors and a few are very
good and can be implemented by Ocean Blue Web Development.
Our focus here was to provide two better known and
trusted solutions, but at the same time you may find other options
that work better for your specific needs. Some solutions specialize
in payment processing outside the United States. These are often
better if you reside in the country that the processor
is based in.
Feel free to use this contact
form regarding
any e-commerce questions you may have or call us toll
free at 1-800-892-2717. We look forward to speaking with
you about your e-commerce needs! |
