Accepting Credit Cards for Online Sales

A Credit Article Contributed by Mark Mcclelland

Should You Accept Credit Card for Online Sales

If you're considering starting up an on-line business, you're probably wondering about the pro's and con's of accepting credit cards as a form of payment... since there are others - that don't involve cash - you know. The technology can certainly be confusing - well, actually there's no 'can be' about it, it IS confusing to us non-geeks.

How to Set up for Accepting Credit Cards

Here are the absolute most fundamental basics for setting your on-line business up to accept credit cards as a form of payment. There are a good many sites that contains far more detail than this article can go into:

First, you'll need to set up your web site and include some kind of on-line form that your customers will use to place their orders, and (perhaps another) that includes places where the customer can enter their credit card information. Make sure that you're using a secure connection between yourself and the customer when they're filling in this information.

Next, you'll need to establish a merchant account with the bank of your choice. While most banks offer credit card merchant accounts, there are only a few you should use for your on-line business. And in fact, some banks won't set up merchants for on-line services at all. The best place to find a decent list of suitable banks is by asking - or visiting the web site of - any of the major distributors of payment processing software.

And last, you'll need a buy some software to process the payments your customers are making. This software will provide the bridge between your web site and your merchant account at the bank.

But unless your really into this stuff, don't even think about trying to do it all yourself. Find someone to set your site up for you, who can deal with the ISP hosting your site, get the Digital Certificate that forms the basis for the secure connection with your customer, ensure that the payment processing software communicates properly with the bank, monitor and maintain your site, etc.

The down Side to Accepting Credit Cards

Are there really any negatives to accepting credit cards as a form of payment? Well, truth be told, there really aren't a whole lot of them, and those there are have a tendency to be perceptions rather than reality.

That being said, however, there's one point that you need to be clear on. When your on-line customers provide their credit card information on the special secure form on your web site you've provided for that purpose, and they press the big "send" button, the information they provide is encrypted and sent over the Internet to your secure server. Once at the server, the payment processing software communicates with the bank, their payment is accepted, and the transaction is done.

The point that needs clarification concerns the encryption part of the process. The encryption technologies currently in use make it very difficult for some would be hacker-cracker to intercept, decrypt, and use that information.... but it's not impossible.

It's possible, at least theoretically, to break any of today's encryption schemes, given enough time and compute power... and that's the key here - time and compute power - something that hackers-crackers don't necessarily have an abundance of. The idea is not to make it impossible, but to make sure it's not worth the would-be felon's time and effort.

In reality, the biggest negative is actually a matter of perception. There are still a lot of people that absolutely refuse to do business on-line if it requires them to enter credit card information. That's not likely to change.... but then again, there are a LOT of people who will shop online.... let's see that smile.