The very first application that you will need to start running your online shop is a shopping cart.
This application allows the store to hold a few items for the visitor as they are browsing the store and still deciding on what to purchase. Once they have made up their minds, they can proceed to the checkout area where they can review the items in the shopping cart, remove those they don’t intend to buy and make payment for the final set of items.
Accept a variety of payments
An online shop has to be able to accept a variety of payments – through credit cards, electronic cash or checks and cash sent through mail.
Remember, most online buyers are impulse buyers and if you do not let them pay via the means available to them at that moment, you are quite likely to lose that sale. For offline payments, you should make an order form available to your customers and provide your mailing address and contact numbers in an easily accessible place on the website.
You may have been told that to accept online payments through credit cards, you need to get a merchant account.
However, merchant accounts are expensive, usually involving high set-up fees, application fees, monthly fees, at times transaction charges and many other hidden charges. If you are just starting out, you may find these charges fairly prohibitive. Further, you may need to sign a contract with the provider for a specific period, which would mean that you have to pay certain minimum charges even if your business is not bringing in the kind of money you had hoped for.
Third-party processing companies
A good alternative may be third-party processing companies that handle credit card transactions or check processing.
These services handle most major credit cards; charge a fairly small setup fee and a per-transaction fee. If you do not make any sales, you do not have to pay any fees to these companies. For all the sales that you make within a given period, they will mail you a check for the sales amount minus their transaction charges.
Steps to prevent credit card fraud
Of course, online payments always present a special challenge – that of security. Many customers even today worry about providing credit card numbers online when enough efforts have been made to ensure that transactions over the Internet are safe.
This is why it is very important that your hosting service provides you with secure server capability so that you can assure your customers that their payment and other sensitive information is being sent via secure, encrypted connections.
Another step you can take to prevent credit card fraud is to ensure that you sign up with a service that will verify the credit cards being used for making purchases – this way you will avoid your business being cheated out of its revenue.
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