How to accept credit cards on your website

So you would like to open up your own website and would like to sell items on it? I would say it's a very good idea. Website is the fastest and cheapest way to reach your audience and sell your items. With the advent of internet, more and more people are getting hooked to the World Wide Web every single day. And the best thing about being an online seller is that you do not have to open up a shop, go through all the pains of completing paper works to establish your business.

Now since you have decided to sell things on your website. You will need to think about the ways of how you can provide them maximum convenience that will bring them back to your site again. Of course the look of the web site, the options, easy drop-down list, attractive schemes, money-back offers have their own benefits, but what about the payment mode? Visitors are very particular about their checkout issues when it comes to online purchasing, as they have to enter their credit card information which is very sensitive piece of information.

Adding the option of accepting credit cards on your web site is not a requirement, but it always gives an added advantage to your website if you provide visitors to make payments through their credit card. Since your website is not limited to any national boundaries, it may happen that international buyers who would like to purchase items on your website and would be more than happy to make the payments immediately. You may lose these international buyers, if your site does not provide credit card options. Even impulsive buyers, who may get attracted to the items you are selling, may punch in their credit card details and buy items on your site.

You must be now wondering how to accept credit cards on your website. Basically, there are two ways to do it. Either you open up your own merchant account, or use a third party merchant. To open up a merchant account you will need to approach your bank and they will guide you with how you can open up your merchant account and what are the facilities they will provide once your merchant account is active. Since you will be handling the credit card payments yourself, the transaction cost is lower when using merchant account.

However, if you are using third party merchant account like PayPal, Amazon's WebStore and CCBill, you will have to pay them a certain amount of fees that will raise your transaction cost. However, the good point about using third party merchant account is that you do not have to worry about the credit card transactions. These third party companies handle all the procedures for you, so you can pay more attention to your products and services and customers.


Posted by James on 2009-09-06 in the category " Tools "