E-Commerce FAQ

What can e-commerce do for me?

Now, without hiring a single new employee, you can receive and process orders from all over the world 24 hours a day.

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What is involved in creating an e-commerce store?

The first step is deciding how to process your transactions. Will you except checks and credit cards? How will you receive orders, e-mail, fax, telephone, regular mail or through an online form? Depending on what you decide, you will need add-ons such as a Merchant ID, payment gateway, digital certificate and shopping cart software.

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How do I accept credit card orders?

Credit cards are an important part of electronic commerce. There are two ways to process credit card transactions through your online store: offline and online.

Offline transaction processing is easy to integrate into an existing business. With this method, your customers place their orders online at your website. The orders are then emailed to you, so you can manually process them as if they were taken over the phone. This is a good solution for smaller merchants--especially if you're just starting your online store and don't know how many orders you'll be taking.

For more advanced merchants who are processing over 100 transactions per month, online transaction processing is more economical. When customers place orders at your website, their credit cards are authorized online in "real time."

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How do I establish a Merchant ID?

Before you can take credit card orders, you must have a good credit rating and establish a Merchant ID. This allows funds to be transferred directly from your customer's credit card account to your merchant bank account.

If you already accept credit cards, then you already have a Merchant ID, and you can use your existing credit card processing method to process Internet transactions manually offline. But be careful: some banks limit the number of "non-swipe" or "card not present" transactions you can process.

If you are a new merchant, a merchant with a limited number of "card not present" transactions, or if you want to process transactions online in "real time," you must obtain an "Internet enabled merchant account." This allows you to process transactions where the credit card numbers are received over the Internet.

To obtain a Merchant ID, start with your existing bank. Each processor has their own set of criteria, so you may want to shop around to find the right company which offers the best discount rates. Banks charge a fee (the discount rate) equal to a certain percentage of the total amount charged for processing the transaction. Discount rates can range from 2.5% to 10% depending on the specific risk factors determined by the bank. Typically, Internet enabled merchant accounts carry a higher discount rate.

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How do I set up a payment gateway?

A payment gateway essentially performs the same function as your Point Of Sale (POS) terminal automatically. The gateway software system takes the online payment information off of your order form and sends this information to the financial processor using your merchant account. Next, it finally reports back whether the transaction was approved. If you'd like to use online payment processing, you must select a payment processing provider.

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A digital certificate (also known as a digital ID or Server ID) is issued by a trusted third party or Certification Authority that validates the identity of a merchant. The certificate verifies the legitimacy of your business: it proves that you're who you say you are, and associates your business with a physical address and phone number. A digital certificate increases a customer's trust in the authenticity of their online transactions. Many web hosts offer shared digital certificates free as apart of their packages.

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What is a shopping cart?

A shopping cart is a program in a website that allows a customer to view products and add them to a "basket" as they would in a physical retail store. The shopping cart is usually connected to a database of products, and helps the merchant with shipping, pricing, and inventory calculations.

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What is SSL?

Secure Socket Layers or SSL allows safe business transactions between the client and merchant. Before a customer orders online, they want to be sure that their personal and ordering details will only be seen by you. In order for you to accept and process credit cards and other private information over the internet with full assurance of customer privacy, customer data can be encrypted and scrambled online via SSL. Before you set up your e-commerce system, make sure your web server has the SSL option. If it doesn't, we can provide it for you. You need a digital certificate combined with SSL to do secure transactions.

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