A guide to website hosting and ecommerce

Accept Payments

Your customers will have the confidence to purchase your goods and services only if your store is secured by SSL. However, online payment is more than just collecting credit card numbers or other payment information. What will you do with customer payment information once it's given to you? How do you verify that customer's credit card information is valid? How do you process and manage those payments with a financial institution? You could simply set up a credit card terminal and process orders manually. But why invest the time and effort to build an e-commerce site if you do not take the advantage of automating the online payment processing? To offer a complete e-commerce experience for your customers and to effectively manage the payments for your business, you need to implement an "Internet payment gateway". This provides the Internet connectivity between buyers, sellers, and the financial networks that move money between them.

Internet Payment Processing System

Before you implement a payment gateway, you need to understand how the Internet payment processing system works. Participants in a typical online payment transaction include:

Your customer

Typically, a holder of a payment instrument — for instance a credit card, debit card, or electronic check — from an issuer.

The issuer

A financial institution, such as a bank, that issues your customer a payment instrument. The issuer is responsible for the cardholder's debt payment.

The merchant

Your e-commerce site, that sells goods or services to the cardholder through a Web site. A merchant that accepts payment cards must have an Internet Merchant Account with an acquirer.

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