When you are considering placing what you have on your store’s shelves online, there are a few items and terminology that will help you better understand the processes you are shortly going to be undertaking. Beyond the actual website issues, the word copy and your hosting, a company looking to bring their business more fully onto the Internet needs to have a system that enables you to take payments reliably and instantaneously as those like Amazon have been doing for years.
As a brick and mortar business owner you are well familiar with Merchant Accounts along with the equipment which swipes the customers’ credit cards and the Point of Sale system that helps you track what you process each day. The Merchant Account serves as a repository for credit card payments and is linked to your bank account, where funds settle each day.
The Payment Gateway is behind that, online and off, and sits between you the merchant and card processor, which passes transactions to the Network (MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, etc.) The job of the Payment Gateway is that of a secure information conduit that complies with credit card processing security rules and regulations (that is where PCI Compliance comes into play). Once the card information is entered, the Payment Gateway securely transmits the card data to the Network, who then passes it on to the card’s issuing bank for authorization. All of these processes happen in the blink of an eye using encryption technologies to ensure confidential cardholder information is promptly secure.
A good gateway will provide all of the tools you need to submit payments to the networks at a reasonable price that is easy to understand.
In your store, all that is in that equipment you have on your counter and in the transaction tracking software that is a part of the system.
Going Online
When you have your store or catalog of sales items online that functionality needs to be connected to your website. No matter if you are using the old and tested HTML, coding JSP or utilizing the PHP driven WordPress Themes to build your website, the connection of those items go from your shopping cart, to the checkout process via the Payment Gateway Programming.
In the instance of using WordPress to build your site, you will have the shopping cart system (Woocommerce, Magento, etc.) that feeds into the Payment Gateway Plugin. At FigPay360, the Complete Ecommerce Suite, you will be able to get that reliable plugin, with a Secure Socket Layer certificate (which does the needed encryption) along with several other sales promoting packages.
In this time of uncertainty with the economy, and as you set your retail business on this new path, you need a solution that has all you would need to bring people to what you sell, help them find confidence in doing business with you online, and then actually capture the sales revenue securely and reliably.
As the industry quickly changes, it is critical to keep up with new technologies and also how traditional technologies are transforming and being used differently.
