Ecommerce Advice
- Accept payments in real-time
There are two ways a payment service provider can help you.
In both cases the service provider checks every order immediately when it is being made, approves or disapproves it and eventually transfers the money into your account, but the only difference is in how you pass these orders on to your service provider for verification. You can send payment verifications instantly over the internet or do them manually over the telephone.
Existing merchant account holder:
An internet merchant account is a special bank account, which allows you to accept credit card payments from your customers on your web site. Internet merchant accounts can make the payment approval process instant and is handled directly by your bank without any interaction from yourself or your staff.
Non-merchant account holder:
Without a real-time payment service you would receive for example credit card details of a customer with the order, and would have to approve them manually yourself. This you would do by typing the details into a little terminal hooked to your bank or by calling a special phone number. It is the most cost effective method and works well, unless you receive lots of orders. It could be a good starting point to keep your costs low, until you have established your shop.
If you get many orders, using a real-time payment service can help you streamline your operation. Some of these services also use sophisticated credit card fraud detection methods, helping safeguard you from fraud.
If you do not have a merchant account, then these service providers can support you by either helping you get such an account or by accepting credit cards in your name. This may well be worth using, as the majority of people on the Internet pay by credit card. Not being able to accept these cards will cost you customers. You will need to decide if the benefits outweigh the costs of such a service.
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