This articles follows on from Part 1
Payment processing
Once a user has filled their shopping cart and is happy to proceed, they need some way to get the money from their credit or debit card to your bank. Remember that the shopping cart only creates orders and calculates totals – it doesn’t let the user pay for them. For that you need payment processing.
It’s a fairly complex process containing a lot of sub-processes that occurs when a user clicks the ‘Pay now’ button, but the basics of it are that a payment gateway acts as an intermediary between the shopping cart and the receiving account, usually an Internet Merchant Account (IMA).
There are two ways to go about setting up the payment gateway and IMA: bundled as a single service, or set up as separate entities.
Payment gateway providers such as Sagepay and RBS Worldpay offer packages that include the payment gateway and IMA as one service, or if you prefer to shop around for your own IMA they can offer the payment gateway as a standalone.
A payment gateway should cost around £20 per month, and your IMA will have various charges associated with it e.g. setup fee, transaction charges, monthly fees, discount fees etc. Transaction fees are typically a small percentage plus a few pence per transaction, decreasing as sales volume increases. For example Nochex fees start at 2.9% plus 20p per transaction.
It’s important to note that if you already have a Merchant Account from your bank to process offline card payments it is not the same as an IMA. You will need to apply for the IMA separately.
There are payment systems that work slightly differently to the standard gateway/IMA model, the most famous being PayPal.
PayPal acts as a payment gateway and pays the money into a PayPal account, which is linked to your standard bank account.
No matter which PayPal option you choose they will charge transaction fees. On the simpler packages that is all you pay, but your users will go to the PayPal website to enter their card details. There is an option called PayPal Website Payments Pro that allows users to pay on your site without leaving to pay on a third party site. Using Website Payments Pro costs £20 per month on top of your transaction fees.
SSL certificate
An SSL certificate is used to secure the flow of information between your website and your site users. The last thing you want your potential customers to see is a box popping up to warn them that the information they are about to send will be transmitting over an insecure connection and asking if they wish to continue, particularly if it is address or credit card details.
Using SSL prevents this situation and ensures that personal information cannot be compromised as it passes over the internet.
Extending E-Commerce
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a system that provides non-repudiated business transactions between you and your supplier, and is a powerful way to avoid all the issues that come with stock control and shipping administration.
If you have a relationship with a supplier who is willing to accept and ship orders on your behalf, EDI will integrate with your website and send orders to your supplier in a format their systems understand.
Even if you don’t hold stock currently but do send orders to your supplier manually, EDI will automate this process.
Somebody who knows what they’re doing to put it all together
An e-commerce website is a totally different ball game to a standard website. It’s as different as an airplane is to a car, so you need to make sure that you don’t trust the construction of it to a fresh-faced web designer with no experience of payment gateways, SSL certificates, hosting and integrating e-commerce systems.
Website NI have built the following successful e-commerce websites: