How to Accept Credit Cards From a Website

Accepting credit cards significantly enhances a website's ability to generate sales. Credit cards make purchases easier for website visitors, enhance a website's professionalism, and reduces the time and labor involved with managing accounts receivables. Although accepting credit cards has a cost, in particular the fee paid to credit card companies, those costs can be minimized through careful planning and implementation.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Active website
• Understanding of your underlying product and service costs and financial goals
• Comprehensive list of all of your products and services
• Financial information including bank records and a recent credit report

1. Decide which credit cards you will accept. Some credit card companies charge more than others, some have more customers, and some provide additional benefits to credit card holders. Research each to determine whether it attracts your kind of customer, and if you can afford to accept its card.
2. Gain access to a merchant account. In order to accept credit card purchases, you must have access to a merchant account for deposits. You can either establish your own merchant account at a bank, or contract with a third-party merchant who will handle credit card purchases for a fee. Your up-front costs will be lower through a third-party merchant, but your on-going fees will be higher.
3. Select a shopping cart system. The electronic shopping cart is the software that manages your product and service catalog, allows customers to select items for purchase, and processes transactions. You can either purchase shopping cart software (or locate an open source alternative) and install it yourself, or your website host might provide an integrated shopping cart option.
4. Decide on a payment gateway service. Credit card transactions are processed through gateways between the shopping cart software and credit card processors.
5. Choose a credit card processor. The processor is a company that handles information from the gateway service, validating credit card transactions and depositing funds in merchant accounts.
6. Test the solution. Now that you have selected the required components, and installed them as necessary, make sure that they are all working correctly and that transactions flow smoothly through the system.
7. Go live. Once your system has been thoroughly tested and any issues resolved, you can start accepting credit cards for purchases. Often, this is simply a matter of adding the pages generated by your shopping cart software to your live website, thus making them available to website visitors.

Tips & Warnings

• Many website hosts provide all of these services in a comprehensive package. The overall fees might be higher, but they can significantly reduce the complications of accepting credit cards.
• Look at business-friendly wholesale clubs like Sam's Club and Costco for attractively priced services.