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If you want to buy and sell anything via your website you will need to set in place more than just your website. You may need some or all of these;
We would suggest a lawyer and accountant too. And all of the above have to be made to work together.
Merchant accounts are provided by banks and other financial organisations with the express purpose of allowing you to trade. You will need one to accept credit and debit cards online. There is usually a vetting process and various charges that you must pay for use of the account. You may also be required to deposit a sum of money to off set cash backs and bad debt. The deposit maybe based on a percentage of your expected income through the account.
You do not have to rely entirely on banks. Some online payment service providers (PSP) such as Worldpay also offer merchant accounts, as do some hosting companies that have links with financial organisations. You need to realise how many eggs you are putting into that basket of your's. For a list of PSPs please see the right hand menu bar.
You have three options:
If you are going to be capturing personal information from customers, then they will expect that information to be transfered via a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection from their browser to your site. With this they will have the yellow padlock icon showing in their browser. They will expect any information given to you to be stored securely, even if the information is there only temporarily. This means secured server space which you can get from most hosting providers, if not part of a package then as an add on option for which you pay extra.
Many hosts will offer shared secure server space, where other websites on the same server as you will be able to have an allocated amount of space to store secure information. What a customer sees in their browser address bar is something like:
https://www.funkyhost.com/joeblogs/form1.html
instead of:
https://www.joeblogs/form1.html
If you want the latter of the two addresses, which gives your customers more confidence in using your site, then you will need a private secure server and a SSL Certificate to go with it. To get these you will need a static Internet Protocol (IP) address as well. Both of which you will have to pay your host extra for, unless it is included as part of an e-commerce package. Do check!
Be aware that if you are collecting peoples personal information you are legally obliged to be registered with the Data Protection Registrar.
This is software that sits on your server and interacts with your customers. It allows customers to select the products they want and to place an order for those goods. Most hosts offer one or more shopping carts as do many PSPs. You need to confirm that whatever shopping cart you want to use is compatible with the payment service provider you intend to use, if indeed you intend to use one.
Finally to complicate matters, there are those companies offering various combinations of these services with the aim of making your life easier. Of course they charge you for it, but what do you expect.
The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to tie your business into just one company? Ideally that is not a good situation, but when you are first starting it may suit your needs. Only you can decide. The only advise worth taking is to do your research well, evaluate all the options, take your time making the right decision for you, make a plan and follow it.
Last updated on Friday 25th May 2007