What You Need To Know When Setting Up Ecommerce

You’ve decided you want to sell your products online but you don’t know where to start. To sell online, the most important parts of the site are a payment gateway, payment processing, a merchant account/bank, and a way to advertise your merchandise. The latter can usually bundled with a website hosting service.

A payment gateway is where a transaction on your site goes to be processed. Every time you do a transaction it will always end up in the gateway. The gateway tells the transaction where the funds that are being received need to go. This is very essential to the process because if the transactions have nowhere to go, then they will just sit on your website and you won’t get the money from the customer.

Once the payment gets to the gateway it then processed and sent to the merchant bank where you can collect the funds and deposit them into whichever bank you please. It’s important to know that when you need to do a refund that if you do not have their money yet, and you process a refund, that money is going to come out of your merchant bank. It will all balance out once you receive the customer’s money, but you have to make sure that you enough money in your account to issue the refund.

Merchant accounts are reasonably easy to come by. They are usually offered in the package when you sign up for a merchant account/payment gateway. The merchant account is where funds are placed once a transaction is processed. As well, it is where funds come from when you do a refund on an order that has been processed. Once you have money on this account, you can transfer it to any bank that you wish, but you just need to make sure there is enough money in there for refunds so that you don’t accidentally over draft.

The website is how you advertise your merchandise. You want a website that is capable of processing online, as well the ability to integrate your payment gateway. This essential so orders placed through the website go to the gateway. If the gateway isn’t integrated with the website, then the order will just sit there and you will have to process the transaction manually.

Manually processing a transaction is something that is becoming an illegality in the online world. What you need to do this is the full credit card number or checking/routing number. This is a huge security considering all of the spyware and viruses out there that can collect information like this. However, it has not yet been outlawed, so this process can still take place, but be sure to use it sparingly as it is very sensitive information.