Accepting credit card payments plays an important role in ensuring
success of your online business. Most of online transactions are done through credit card payments. Your business will be greatly affected if your website cannot accept credit card. While it is true that people will still buy your products if you don't accept credit card payments, you will greatly enhance your chances of closing a sale by giving customer option of paying you through credit card.
In this article, you will learn how online credit card payment processing works, how to accept credit card on your website, issues to handle when accepting credit card payment on your website, and 3rd party credit card processors.
So, how does it work? First, you'll need to have a merchant account. In fact, a special type of merchant account called internet merchant account. Don't worry if you don't have one now. I will show you how your website can still accept credit card even without a merchant account. It is a special banking account that enables you to process credit card payment from your customers.
Credit card payment involves a very simple process i.e. to transfer funds from customers credit card account to seller's bank account. The sequence is basically as follows:-
1. The customer goes to your site and decides to buy from you. He then enters credit card details onto a SECURE ORDER FORM on a secure server (denotes as httpS://). The next stage is basic fraud avoidance like validating card number and address verification etc.
2. Then, this information is transmitted through a payment GATEWAY to Credit Card Association such as Visa or MasterCard. A GATEWAY is mechanism that transfers your customer's credit card details to processor so that you get paid.
3. Transaction is either authorized or declined depending on state of card, whether it has been stolen, or has exceeded its credit limit, available funds and other things it deems important before allowing transaction to go through. Results are sent back to merchant. If it is authorized, customers will be led to a "thank-you page" where downloading instructions of your infoproduct are given.
To begin accepting credit card on your website, there are few issues to be considered first...
1. Security Issue How secure is your order form? Many people remain reluctant to give their credit card details to someone that they deem unreliable. To eliminate their guards, you need to have your order form placed in a secure server with certification.
When your customer enters his credit card particulars, it is sent in plain, unencrypted text form to host server. And it is possible to intercept this data by unscrupulous hackers. So, you must use SSL encryption to ensure no unauthorized individual can decode information. Once your customers know their credit card information is secure, they will be *MUCH* willing to give their credit card details.
2. Real Time vs Delayed With real time payment processing, you will be able to process your customer's credit card information *WITHIN SECOND*. Surely you don't want a credit card payment processor that takes 24 hours to verify card is valid. Customers are expecting an *INSTANT* verification so that they can download infoproduct immediately.
With delayed payment processing, however, data does not go through gateway. So you can inspect all orders and correct them. This would be fine if you have only few orders per day. What happen when you have hundred or even thousand orders per day? It is certainly very time-consuming and ineffective. So, my advice is to use a real time credit card processor.
3. Refund Policy How are you going to handle refunding if customers are not happy with your products and request a refund from you? Generally, you will get some refund requests form your customers. You cannot please everyone. You will still receive refund request no matter how good your products are. Therefore, you'll need to have a refund plan. You must decide how are you going to return money to your dissatisfied customers. Are you going to do all by yourself or hire a full time employee to handle refunding or leave it to a company that will handle all hurdles and hassles of returning money to your dissatisfied customers?
