Article No. 210
Created: 04:06 AM 06.15.04
Author: HPU Support [Link: support@homepageuniverse.com]
Original URL: https://my.homepageuniverse.com/support/knowledgebase/question.php?qstId=210
One vital E-Commerce component is accepting credit card payments. To do that, you have two choices; set up your own merchant account or have payments made to you through a credit card payment facility. The biggest advantage of setting up a merchant account is you only pay 3% on each credit card transaction you process. The down side is setting up a merchant account costs around $1500 upfront for fees, equipment or software.
Your alternative is to process your payments through a payment facility which will cost anywhere from 6% to 15% per transaction. Depending upon the dollar amount and number of transactions you will be handling, setting up your own merchant account could pay for itself quickly.
Next, think about how users will shop on your site and how you will process their orders. If you are selling a small number of items, you probably don’t need a shopping cart system. If you offer a larger inventory that customers will want to purchase in one transaction, you want to make it as easy as possible for them and that means using a shopping cart.
If you want your ordering system to work in real-time, then your shopping cart system will have to be compatible with your merchant account. If you will only be processing a few orders per day, you may want to save the additional costs of real-time order processing and process the orders manually. In that case, your shopping cart and merchant account work completely independent of each other and do not have to be compatible.