Overview - Taking Payment over the Internet

So you have a great product to sell. You create a website and offer your product for sale on that website. Now everybody wants to buy it, but how would you collect payments? Feel lost? Don't be, we will guide you through the whole process of accepting credit card payments over the internet. There are several methods to choose from when collecting payments over the internet. We will go over each method in detail and will discuss their pros and cons on this website.

Altogether there are three different ways of implementing online credit card processing on a website. One of them is the manual system and the other two can be categorized as automated systems. The manual system is the least complex of all. Where as the automated systems are some what complex. However, these automated systems are highly efficient and offer several benefits over the manual system.

There are two essential requirements for automated internet credit card processing (1) payment gateway and (2) merchant account. There are many online vendors offering their services to facilitate automated online credit card processing. These vendors and their services can be divided into two categories. Vendors and their services that fall in the first category, only provide a payment gateway. This means, a business must open a merchant account under its own name through some financial institute, usually a bank. Vendors and their services that fall in the 2 nd category, provide you with a payment gateway and a third party merchant account. This means that your business will use a third party's (usually the vendor's) merchant account to receive the proceeds of the credit card transactions. This saves the hassle of opening a merchant account, which can be a cumbersome process.