"Bring your products and services to your customers"
This overview is intended to help you understand what the word "E-Commerce" means and what you need to know in order to turn your web site into an online store.
There are three major requirements for setting up a fully functional e-commerce website:
- A shopping cart
- A payment gateway
- A merchant account.
Differentiating among these three items can be somewhat confusing, so we take many steps to make this process easier.
When building your web site you need to ask the following questions:
Do you need real time credit card processing?
Do you have a merchant account set up?
Do you need to have "secure web pages" in order to accept credit card information from your customers? If so, do you wish to use our shared secure web site, or create your own on your web site?
Do you need real time credit card processing?
When setting up a website you need to know if you want to process credit cards online via a "payment gateway" or off-line at a Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal. Both systems work basically the same: they verify the credit card number, check the expiration date, confirm the card has available credit, send the information to your merchant account, and send an approved or declined message to you or your shopping cart. We support many of the most popular payment gateways, and most can be accessed for use with your custom shopping cart. Payment Gateway companies are services you must subscribe to, so there are fees involved with setting gateways up. These fees vary and may include a setup fee, a monthly fee, and per transaction fees (or any combination of all three). Gateways interact with your merchant account to charge a credit card (authorization) and collect the money to deposit into your bank account (settlement).
Do you have a merchant account set up?
So you have a shopping cart, and a payment gateway. Now you need a way to accept payments made for the products you sell. A "merchant account" is a type of relationship you have with a bank or other financial institution to accept and deposit credit card payments. Generally, your local bank will have a process or service in place that allows for online transactions. If not, or if they want to charge fees that are unacceptable to you, there are a myriad of other companies who specialize in merchant accounts. As with payment gateways, a merchant account is a service, and there are fees associated with this service. Fees can range from application and/or setup fees, licensing fees, discount rates (a fee that goes to the bank and the processor to cover the costs of the transaction), monthly service fees, per transaction fees.
We work with several vendors that provide both gateway and merchant accounts, helping you find the best available price and will assist you in finding a vendor that suits your requirements.
Do you need to have "secure web pages" in order to accept credit card information from your customers? If so, do you wish to use our secure web site, or create your own on your web site?
When taking customers' Credit Card numbers, your customers want to be assured that data is being sent securely over the internet. Technologies like "SSL encryption" are used to encrypt data as it is being sent, so that the information cannot be intercepted and read in transit. SSL encryption requires the use of a "Certificate", which can be thought of as a "key" that "locks" the incoming data, and "unlocks" it when it arrives so the information can be used.
As you may have guessed, there is a cost to obtain these "Certificates". You have two options when hosting with us.
We allow our customers to "borrow" or share our certificate. We provide you with a sub-directory of our web site that you can put web pages on that require security. An example of this would be:
https://www.webmystyle.com/yourdomain/pagename.asp
Note the "https", the "s" is needed to display the web page in "secure" mode.
If this not an option, and you would rather have your own certificate, then you will want to purchase it from a company like GeoTrust or Thawte. Once "installed" you can secure any page. An example of this would be:
https://www.yourdomain.com.
Click here for more information on e-commerce and shopping carts.
To request additional information on our internet solutions or other services please use our Bid Wizards.