How to Accept Credit Cards on a Website
There are a couple of tools you will need to accept credit cards on your website. These ecommerce tools include:
- A merchant account
- A payment gateway
- Some type of shopping cart or order form
- SSL certificate
- Product or service to sell!
Let's explore what each of these does to enable credit card processing online.
Merchant Account - This is the account that actually drops the money charged from the customer into your bank account. These credit card merchant accounts are easy to signup for online with a few bits of your business or personal information. The cost is very minimal to startup and usually a very low monthly fee. The main cost is based on the per transaction.
Payment Gateway - A payment gateway is the software system that interfaces your website. It takes the data from your order form and processes it through to your merchant account. This is done securely if integrated properly with a SSL certificate. One of the most popular payment gateways is Authorize.net which we'll review here soon.
Shopping Cart - You need some type of system for customers to add products to a cart or order page for them to "checkout" with. There are many different types of shopping carts and order processing systems. These can include hundreds of products or a single product/service website. Yahoo shopping carts are some of the most popular, but GoDaddy shopping carts are the best available.
SSL Certificate - This is installed on the web server by your web host. They start in cost at around $12.99/year if you order a GoDaddy SSL Certificate. The prices go up from there depending on the level of encryption - we recommend at least 128-bit encryption. SSL certificates are what encrypts the data that gets transfered from your website to your payment gateway.
Product or Service - if you're selling something like windows web hosting - you will need a single order form system. If you're selling a product like camping equipment or digital cameras you will need a multiple product shopping cart system.
