Selling Online

E-commerce is a fantastic opportunity for almost every business; make your website work for you while you’re away from your desk 24/7. We can help you set up the whole process; building a shopping cart catalogue and functionality; liaising with your merchant provider and then working with you to provide the processes, forms and communications tools that you’ll need to offer a quality experience to your customers.

The key to success is keeping the focus on your customer’s experience, making sure that they’ll be delighted not just by your products but also in the manner of their delivery. 

The nuts and bolts to make E-Commerce work

We produce a range of e-commerce sites tailored to our client's precise brief.  Common features in all of them are:

• Product Catalogue
• Customer registration
• Customer Communications
• Order Processing
• Shopping Cart / Checkout process
• Payment Provider Integration
• Shipping Modules

Collecting your Customers' Money

It is important to offer your customers choice in the way that they trade with you.  There is no reason why customers cannot pay for your goods by cheque or direct bank transfer but most customers will regard Internet shopping as a fast and convenient way to purchase and so will want the immediate satisfaction of completing their purchases by credit card.

You then have a choice in the way that you collect the money.

Either you can process the transactions on your own site or you can elect for your Payment Service Provider (PSP) to do this for you.  The difference being that if you have the payments collected by your PSP then your customer's will very obviously 'leave' your site to process the transaction, on the plus side your hosting costs will be cheaper as you will not need to protect the transaction (and therefore your website) behind an SSL certificate on a secure server (HTTPS). 

Payment Process and Jargon

In one paragraph we've suddenly started using some fairly dense acronyms - let's take a quick look at how the process of collecting money on the Internet works and explain what all the terms mean and who does what.

Your customers browse through the online catalogue of your products and services on your website, selecting what they want as they go adding them to their 'shopping cart'.  Having shopped they will then go through the 'Checkout' process where payment will be taken by the PSP.

The PSP will then forward the funds to your Acquirer who will in turn credit your Internet Merchant Account; and then the money will be passed from your IMA to your current account.

Payment Service Provider (PSP)

- the organisation which takes the money from your customer's card.

Payment Gateway Provider - Acquirer

- the organisation (likely to be your existing bankers) who collect the money from the PSP and provide you with an Internet Merchant Account (IMA).

Internet Merchant Account (IMA)

- the account that your customer's Credit and debit card payments will be credited.

SSL Certificate

- A unique encryption key that scrambles sensitive communications in a one-way cipher that effectively secures the communications from your server to your PSP

HTTPS - HyperText Transport Protocol Secure

- we use HTTPS to direct sensitive web communications to a secure port on the web server that is protected by an SSL certificate

How do we sort all that out then?

Talk to your bank.  The first thing you need to do is apply for an Internet Merchant Account.  If you already have a Merchant Account with a PDQ machine then start with the provider who supply's you that account; the application process through them will be much quicker - although you should expect the process to take at least 28 days.

If you don't already have a merchant account then you will need to make a new application - you have the opportunity to go to almost any acquiring bank that offers the service although in reality there is little difference in cost or service offered and all of them will rely on an extensive credit scoring exercise that will include a recommendation from your existing business manager.  If you're starting from scratch be prepared for this process to take 12 weeks.

PayPal

- love them or loath them PayPal have made this process very easy.  Their 'Website Payments Standard' product will enable you to accept payments from credit cards, setup automated payments, accept donations and sell gift certificates on the same day that you set up the account.  The downside is that their transaction fees will likely be higher than an Acquiring Bank, although there are no set-up fees, monthly account fees, gateway fees or fraud protection fees.

Conclusion

- find out all that you can from your bank about their likely charges and estimate how much PayPal will charge for your anticipated monthly sales turnover.  Then exercise your patience muscle!