Online credit card payments

Without a way of accepting credit card payments online, you will not be taking many orders in your ecommerce website! For traditional retailers who are used to taking the occasional telephone orders and putting the credit card payment through the shop chip and pin machine are often confused about what they need to do to take ecommerce online credit card payments.

Long gone are the ways when you could simply capture credit card payments online and have them emailed to the shop for processing. PCI compliance now means that it is difficult for the small retailer to hold the credit card details in his own system.

To take online credit card payments, you have to use a separate system, supplied by a company called a Payment Provider. Fortunately for small retails, recent years have seen such payment provider system become much easier to setup and use. Payment providers usually interface directly with the customer to collect and charge their card details, and put the payment through your merchant account. Usually there will be an online web site where you, the retailer, can run reports on transactions and perform refunds against certain transactions.

Your need a merchant account

THe first thing to remember is that this payment system is probably going to be completely separate to the payment systems you have in your shop. Having an integrated EPOS and ecommerce payment solution is certainly possible, but requires a large budget and lots of integration! The first thing you will need is a separate merchant account for taking ecommerce credit card payments. It is normal to set this up with your existing chip and pin merchant account holder.

Sagepay is perhaps the best

There are hundreds of payment providers out there, but there is no sense going with a small company, you should use one of the big names - and perhaps the biggest name at the moment is SagePay - the payment provider formally know as Protx. Sagepay probably have the best online application system for new users. If you are capable of buying something in an online shop, you'll be able to handle the Sagepay application form!

Sagepay go one better than most payment providers. They have teamed up with RBS to give an online merchant account application. This suddenly makes applying for a payment provider ten times easier! Their rates are about 2.5% for credit cards or 40p for debit cards.

One of the reasons for using a payment provider is that all the complexities like 3D secure are looked after for you - and when the banks invent a new system for online customer verification, the payment providers will have to do the work to integrate with it, not you!

Integrating with your existing website

The other side of payment providers is integrating it with your Ecommerce site. If you use a industry standard ecommerce software platform, you may well find they already work with your chosen payment provider. If is doesn't, consider choosing a payment provider which does work! All you probably have to do is enter you payment provider account details into the configuration section of your ecommerce store, and you'll be up and running.

If you have a bespoke site provided by a smaller ecommerce software house, you might find that you have to pay them to work with a particular payment provider. An ecommerce software house needs to integrate with each online payment provider separately - and this can be costly work!

So there is a balance. Choose a payment provider that is already supported by your Ecommerce software, but, on the other hand, do not choose Ecommerce software which does not support the primary payment providers, such as Sagepay.

Further integration

A further level of integration is possible. The standard integration with a payment provider usually means that the customer is taken off to the provider's (E.g. sagepay) website to complete the transaction with the customer. Some years ago this was frowned upon - it was deemed to scare the customer and give them a barrier to completing the transaction. Things have changed in recent years - customers expect to be whisked off to a recognised payment provider (another reason to use a common one!) and are slightly doubtful of typing their card details directly into a form on the retailers website. However, this approach is possible, but is usually more expensive and requires a lot more programming - ask your EPOS or Ecommerce software provider, but they should hopefully push you down the route of using a third party online payment provider in the normal manner.

The ultimate integration is a system that takes the money for ecommerce transactions when the order is dispatched from your integrated EPOS and sales order management software - but this is another story!

Although accepting Paypal and GoogleCheckout are nice features to have on your ecommerce website, they are not a replacement for taking online credit card payments through an online payment provider.