When I set up my first ecommerce website I found the information surrounding online credit card purchases to be more confusing than any other aspect of marketing on the Internet.

The reason as it turns out is that the various organizations offering to advise you on how to set online payment systems up have conflicting interests and, in some cases, no idea how the systems work together.

The other potentially confusing aspect of online payments is that the entire system involves a number of service suppliers each providing one element of the entire chain. The real trick is getting them all working together.

So let me outline the parts and then give you a couple of suggestions for how you might approach an ecommerce system for your business. (There are dozens of ways to get the same thing done!)

Internet Merchant Account – In order to take online payments, when you don’t physically swipe a credit card, you need an Internet merchant account. This account can be issued by your bank or by a host of companies, such as Merchant Warehouse, that offer Internet merchant accounts. It’s important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your store or business, you will need to get an Internet account as they are different. This account will include a set-up fee and some % per transaction fee.

Most banks only provide merchant accounts for Visa and MasterCard. It is a very good idea to offer American Express and Discover card payment options. In order to do this you need to contact American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once you have this information you can provide it to your merchant account provider’s payment processor to process all four cards in the same account.

Virtual Terminal – A virtual terminal is an add-on service that comes with your Internet merchant account. This allows you to take phone orders or in-person workshop orders and then go to a secure Internet based site and process the orders into your account.

Secure Payment Gateway – Since Internet traffic is susceptible to eavesdropping you will need a secure payment gateway that allows your customer’s credit card data to be secure as they place orders. This is yet another service provider that specializes in secure transaction and takes the secure data and passes it through a secure gateway to your payment processor. You want to make sure that this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would stick with one of the leading gateway providers. This would include Authorize.net, VeriSign and SkipJack There is a fee for this service as well. It is important that you communicate who your gateway provider is to your merchant account provider.

If you are selling goods that are available to download immediately you will also need what is known as real time processing from your secure processor. This is simply a connection that gets a credit card transaction approved or declined in real time as a customer places an order. There is an additional charge for this service.

Shopping Cart – shopping carts come in software and hosted service based versions that allow your customers to shop for multiple items and then pass the order to your payment system by way of checkout. This service is very important if you have multiple products available on your web site. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to make sure that your shopping cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa – just ask.

Third Party Processing – There is an alternative solution to the entire puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party provider may offer all of the processing and no merchant account is required. The drawback to this approach is that you generally pay a higher overall fee per transaction and have limited ability to customize your customer’s check out experience to match your website. PayPal, an eBay company, is the largest provider of this approach and is a very acceptable option.

A Few Words of Advice

Each piece of the ecommerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly set price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and set-up fees. Start with your bank, but shop this aspect around. Most small business owners should be able to set-up a fully functioning, real time processed site with a shopping cart for less that $150/mo (not including per transaction fees)

Make sure that you find out which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category you shouldn’t have any problems.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

There are millions of retail websites on the Internet that use online shopping carts to enable customers to order products or services online. If you’ve ever shopped online, however, you know that all online shopping carts are not created equal. Some are confusing to use, don’t allow you to make changes as you progress through the ordering process or are limited in terms of payment options and other features.

Having a shopping cart system that doesn’t work well or is limited in functionality is often a mistake new websites make. They lavish lots of time and money on making the site appealing, showing off their products or services in the best possible light and even adding cool flash add-ons and other extras, but cut corners on the shopping cart because they see it as a mundane, boring feature that is strictly utilitarian. The problem that arises from that attitude is that shoppers can quickly lose their enthusiasm for purchasing a product or products if they become frustrated when going through the online checkout.

Online shopping carts should be customer friendly. People make mistakes; it’s a fact of life. If your website’s online shopping cart system is well-designed, it will allow for errors by having links on each page for going back and making corrections or enabling the shopper to change his mind on one item without losing his entire order in the process.

Internet shopping is only as convenient as the payment options for most people. If a retail website offers wonderful gifts, clothing or furniture but doesn’t accept credit cards, it will lose a hefty proportion of its customers. Conversely, if a variety of options such as major credit cards, PayPal and e-checks are available; shoppers will be more inclined to make purchases.

Shopping carts must also have back end flexibility. Of course, offering lots of different options and services through your online shopping cart system is great for your customers, but if it isn’t easy to use and adapt to your own company’s needs from the back end as well, it won’t help. If you have a flexible, intuitive back end design, however, you’ll find that a more complex shopping cart system can actually make your work easier.

There are many companies today who offer custom designed online shopping carts as well as companies that offer several different software packages that you can tailor to fit your specific needs at a reasonable cost. Using these specialists to help you implement an online shopping cart experience for your website can improve everything from your customer service to your bookkeeping, since you can use these systems for not only placing orders, but for tracking inventory and assessing sales trends.

When researching online shopping cart options for your website, ask some serious questions about what the provider can offer you. Considerations on whether the software package will include the source code so that you can customize your online shopping cart as your needs change should be an option. Find out if there is technical support available if and when you need it. Research what types of payment options can be set up with the shopping cart program. And learn if the system is a dynamic one that can evolve and change, as shopper’s needs change.

Be sure when you’re looking for the right online shopping cart service or package that you really know what you’ll need. Whether you offer customized gifts or require drop-down menus for color, size and style choices, your decision will be based on your needs. Also, find out what the return policies are for the particular product you are interested in. Knowing as much as possible about what you want will ensure that you don’t fall short when you invest in your website’s online shopping cart system.

Author Description
AspDotNetStorefront is a premier “>storefront provider.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

The increasing availability of shopping cart software has lead to an increase in the number of people launching internet stores, many of these people are inexperience with advanced web design techniques and theories and many more purchase cheap design work that doesn’t focus on what the store customer’s wants and needs. What the customer wants from an online store is to be able to find and purchase the products that they want as easily and quickly as possible.

When a customer visits your site it is more than likely, if your marketing has been successful, that they wish to purchase a product from you. As a store owner you need to remove every possible barrier between them arriving to your site and completing your purchase, the more barriers you make your customers climb over the more likely they are to run off your competitors.

This article contains will focus on a number of areas of usability and how to apply them to your eCommerce store, there are many many areas of usability that need to be considered when designing an eCommerce store and this article could be multiple pages long but we are going to focus on four factors that we feel are the most important. These areas are navigation, searches, validation and checkout.

The Navigation that you implement on your site is probably the most important aspect of usability, if your visitors cannot find their way around your site your dead in the water. It is imperative that you make sure your navigation is clear, simple and in a prominent place on your pages. Although navigation is an area that is normally implement quit well in eCommerce solutions where they normally fall down is their user of markers to make sure the user knows where about in the store they are, if they get lost and cannot find their way out they are going to get frustrated. There is a number of very well tested web design standard to get round this issue. Category tabs, dynamic menus and breadcrumb trails all help your customer find their way around your site.

If a customer lands on your front page and cannot immediately see where the product they want will be more surfers initial actions it to reach for the search box so make sure that your search box is obvious and easily accessible. The other area of your sites search facility you need to pay attention to is the results it is important to make sure that your customers are getting the right results when they do find the search box. It is normally a good idea to ’adjust’ the search results on internet stores to allow customer to be presented with the products they’re looking for.

Making sure your site validates against the W3C Standards is important. Making sure your site follows CSS and XHTML/HTML guidelines will make sure your sites appearance is replicated accurately across different types of web browsers, non-valid pages have their errors corrected by the browser, how this works varies radically across different browsers (and even different version of the same browser).

In order to minimise shopping cart abandonment the usability of the Checkout component of your shopping cart software is important. There are a number of important steps to take to make sure your checkout process is as usable as possible.

- Make sure your checkout is as short as possible, people get bored quickly on the internet
- Don’t ask for any information you don’t need, people are weary of giving away personal information
- Remove all distraction from the checkout, if they click away from the purchase they might never come back. This includes removing any unnecessary internal site navigation

There are many more aspects of usability you will need to consider when looking for shopping cart software but these should get you started in the right direction.

Article source: ContentLog.com

Author Description
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software is a one stop shop for all the information you need about shopping cart software and ecommerce solutions

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

That doesn’t mean of course people are going to stop going to Macy’s or Wal-Mart. For many people there is something wonderfully familiar about going inside a store. Whether face to face customer service and support, actually being able to touch the products or just getting out of the house, the reality is ecommerce in many ways will never be able to compete with the traditional retail stores.

But you can create a level of trust and dependability which can rival anything offline by setting up an effective web site marketing strategy. Many apprehensions that people hold about doing business on the internet can be alleviated by the way you implement your web site marketing strategy. There are several things you can do.

1. Put Yourself in their Shoes.

Businesses have come and gone due to the insistence of many store owners that they know what’s best for the customer. Just put a product out there and people will automatically fall in line. Not. To get the most out your internet marketing plan, you need to constantly ask yourself “what do your customers want?” Then give it to them. Is it more variety of products or to have any and all of their concerns addressed before they decide to buy. You may not be able to answer every question or apprehension but putting forth the effort to try can only increase your customer conversion rate.

2. Grabbing their Attention the Right Way

How many times have you walked into a store and something did not sit well with you. Maybe it was the quality of the merchandise or the less than stellar customer support you received. Whatever the reason the old saying, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” remains a significant part of doing business. This goes double for your web site page. If people don’t like your web site upon first viewing the easiest thing for them to do is click to another site.

If you are for instance selling videos a good web internet marketing you can do yourself and the customer a big favor by having images of your top selling movies with a critique by you or people who have seen these films. If possible go to one of the many file sharing sites and download movie clips onto your web site page. Make your site interactive and encourage people to leave comments on whatever movies they like or dislike. The point is to not only grab their attention and hold it but to let your website become familiar and comfortable to them. Once you do this, the buying a product stage gets easier to people.

3. Availiable for the Ready.

Got a problem at your local department store? Just ask the manager. That might not be conducive to internet web site marketing especially if you have a world wide clientele scattered over the different time zones. That’s why you should consider building a web site page or two which does nothing but answer questions the customer may have. If you can set up online customer support fine but a frequently asked question page should do the trick. Also throw in some useful tips on how they can get the most out of your product.

One thing you definitely want to emphasize in your customer relationship is the safety and security of purchasing a product. Display this prominently and back it up with testimonials from people who have bought from you in the past. If you are just starting make sure the security parameters of purchasing from you are clearly spelled out on your web site page and backed it up with a guarantee.

People are becoming more at ease with buying online but that does not mean you can take this for granted. Many of the concerns people have about shopping offline are magnified a thousand times over when it comes to buying on the internet. Your internet marketing plan should include a good web site design built in such away so that people grow to trust you. Do this first and the revenue will follow.

About the Author

Author Daryl Campbell invites you to get more free tips, video, step by step coaching and up to the minute information to help you grow your business into a long term success at Internet Marketing Guide. Daryl’s original title: “How to Build a Good Customer Relationship with Web Internet Marketing”.