Ecommerce
Online shoppingOnline shopping has become more widely accepted as consumers become more comfortable and trusting shopping in an online environment. The excessive, early days of enterprises rushing online with little thought and planning have now well passed. Increasingly, many small to medium businesses are finding their place online and are benefitting hugely from the increased market coverage available to them on the internet. There are now many excellent shopping cart packages available for purchase and there are even some good quality ones that are free! Which cart you use depends entirely on the scale of your business. Payment gatewaysAnother factor to consider is the usage of payment gateways to automatically process credit card payments online in real time. The costs of these vary from gateway to gateway but typically involve a yearly fee or a percentage levy on transactions (or a combination of the both). To make use of these facilities you will need to upgrade your standard merchant account to an Internet merchant account. Credit Card manual processingAn alternative to using a payment gateway is to simply take your orders online and then process them manually using your standard merchant facility. This would suit a small business with low initial turnover but would become too labour intensive for a higher turnover operation. Nevertheless, some enterprises prefer to start this way. |
Shopping carts
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