E-Commerce Beginners Guide: Credit Card Processing

Using a third-party credit card processor enables merchants to start accepting credit cards easily and without any special technical knowledge, with very modest amount of initial capital required. First of all you will need to create product pages where you list the products you sell, indicating their properties and prices. It is highly important to design the product pages in a proper way, to ensure that your web-site visitor is able to navigate all pages easily. We will discuss the peculiarities of product pages design in one of our consecutive articles in more detail.

You should also create a Thank You page (return URL), i.e. the page where the customer lands after the purchase is completed. This page may display simple thank you message and the service information, e.g. date/time when the product is going to be shipped for tangible products or download/installation instructions for intangible ones.

Further, it is necessary to work at the technical side of the purchase process. As your customer selects the product he wants to purchase, he clicks the link that redirects him to your credit card processor's secure page, where the transaction is processed. It is important to process the transaction via secure channel as losing credit card data conditions possibilities for credit card fraud. Normally, credit card processors get the necessary data from your web-site via POST or GET method. Credit card processors normally give detailed explanations of the technical nuances they have. In many cases you will have to create the detailed product list within vendor shell - interface where the vendor controls all processing issues. Product list will include product code, name, description, price and any other technical information varying for every credit card processor. Some credit card processors allow creating new products "on the fly", i.e. immediately during the process of transaction.

As soon as your product list is created, it is possible to create the "Buy Now" link for each of the products. "Buy Now" link will contain your vendor ID, product code, quantity of products purchased, return URL, transaction type and some other technical data (varies for each payments processor). Once all your links are tested and your vendor's account is activated, you will be able to accept orders. Vendor's area on your credit card processor's web-site will enable you to trace and process incoming orders, conduct security checks on your customers, get statistical data on sales and resolve any other related issues.