What is E-commerce?

Electronic commerce, or E-commerce as it’s more commonly known, is the name given to any type of business or commercial transaction conducted over the Internet.  It includes a wide range of different business types, from retail sites selling goods and services to consumers (B2C), through to auction and music download sites, and business to business (B2B) electronic transactions.

What is a Shopping Cart?

A shopping cart is a piece of software that acts as an online store's catalogue and ordering process. Typically, a shopping cart is the interface between a company's website and its deeper infrastructure, allowing consumers to select products, review what they have selected, make necessary modifications or additions; and then purchase the products.

What are my options for handling transactions?

You have a number of options for handling transactions. The most basic approach is to handle all of your transactions offline. For example, you could publish your address and bank account details and have your customers send a cheque or pay via Direct Credit into your bank account. You could also collect your customers' credit card information via a secure online form, or over the phone, and then process the credit card transactions offline using your retail merchant account.

However, to increase the speed and convenience your shop provides your customers, it should be able to accept and process credit card transactions online and in real time.  You can handle your own online transactions or outsource them to a third-party credit card processor, like WorldPay.

What is a merchant account?

A merchant account enables you to accept credit cards as payment for the purchase of goods and services. There are different types of merchant accounts. For example, if you have a traditional 'brick and mortar' store, you can get a retail merchant account. If you want to accept credit cards on your website, however, you need a specialised type of merchant account known as an Internet Merchant Account (IMA).

Internet Merchant Accounts enable you to handle Internet transactions in "real time" without any human intervention. Because the risk of credit card fraud is greater when you are accepting credit cards over the Internet, these specialised merchant accounts also provide additional checks that can significantly reduce the chance of credit card fraud. Once the transactions are processed, the merchant account provider transfers the funds received from the credit card transactions from your merchant account to your bank account.

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway is a service that connects your online store with your merchant account provider. This service reads the information from the order forms and translates that information for the merchant account. The payment gateway also verifies that the customer's credit card account has the necessary credit available for the purchase.

How can I assure my customers that their transactions are secure?

Obviously, if your customers will be submitting their credit card information to you online they will want to know that this information is safe. If they are not comfortable with the security your site offers, they will probably not buy products from you.

The best way to alleviate your customers concerns is to secure your site using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). When a site is secured with SSL - the standard form of encryption currently used on the web - visitors will see a special symbol in their browser window that indicates the site is secure. Visitors can also tell that a page is secured by looking at the URL. A secure page URL begins with the letters HTTPS instead of the standard HTTP.