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

Step1

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.

Step2

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.

Step3

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.

Step4

Decide on a payment gateway service. Credit card transactions are processed through gateways between the shopping cart software and credit card processors.

Step5

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.

Step6

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.

Step7

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.