One of the most important aspects of an online shopping experience is payments. No matter where you decide to sell your products, customers have to pay for their orders in some manner. Especially when you have your own store, setting up the online payment processing ecommerce stores have can be challenging.
Once you set up your ecommerce store, one of the most important aspects that you need to pay attention towards is payments. After all online payment processing ecommerce store owners must have. It decides how smoothly your checkout goes through. And most importantly, the product you are selling helps you receive the money into your accounts.
There are several types of gateways that you can set up for your online store. But, it is important to remember that it should be reliable and secure. A lot of payment related fraudulent activities occur online. This leads to a damaged reputation of the ecommerce store as well as loss in revenue. To make sure that any such things don’t happen with your business, you need to be aware.
A seamless payment system helps you receive the payment for your online transactions effortlessly. It enables smooth and secure transactions from the customers. This serves you two benefits-
- The amount of purchase you collect from your customer safely reaches your account
- Your customer goes through a secure transaction, safely transferring you the purchase amount
But, these can happen only if you understand the online payment processing ecommerce stores have to go through. However, there is no need to worry, since we’ve got you covered! Read on to find out more about the completing the online payment process successfully-
What Do You Need for the Online Payment Process?
Once you decide you set up a payment system for your customers, you need to take some steps. Understand that the payment system you will be setting up consists of two parts. These are known as-
- Merchant Account
- Payment Gateway
Both of these need to be complete if you want the integration of a payment system in your online store. While the first part focuses on you linking your bank account to the gateway. The latter asks you to set up a bridge for the customers to pay for their orders safely.
Remember that there should be absolutely no loss of trust or money in the process. Once you complete these, you can begin selling products to your customers. And your customers can start paying you the order amount without any hassles.
It is wise to know that setting up a payment system has nothing to do with redeeming coupons and vouchers. That is an additional feature which you can get via plugins and store features available online. While some stores offer it at free of cost, others charge some amount for it.
What is a Merchant Account?
Now that you know what’s required to set up payments on your online store, let’s understand the first part. A merchant account is the first step you take when you decide to set up payments. It is like a bank account that can accept payments from your customers.
The speciality of a merchant account online payment processing ecommerce stores must know is that it can accept payments from various sources. For example, it can accept the payments from credit cards, debit cards, third party applications such as wallets etc. This helps you provide options to the customers when it comes to selecting the mode of payment. In addition to this, it opens your doorway to accept payments form multiple channels.
For a merchant account, you need to open a new one by signing up a contact with the bank. Opening a merchant account ensures that all the payments are being transferred into your business bank account.
The bank will ask you several questions at this point of time. Alternatively, you will be required to fill up a form asking the details as below-
- Your business type
- Nature of products and services you sell online
- Your target customers
- Currencies you want to accept payments
- Forecast of your sales for a particular period and more.
Once you fill up these information the bank will access your application on several parameters. With the clearance, you will be assigned a unique ID and your business merchant account.
As enticing as it sounds, the business merchant account comes with a fee. There are different types of charges that are levied upon the merchant bank accounts by the banks. Online payment processing ecommerce store owners must inquire about these in advance. Some of these charges would include monthly fee, transaction fee among others.
For example, the bank might charge you on every transaction that occurs, which means that every time a customer pays you for the order, you will be charged with an amount based on the order value. If you neglect these charges, you might have to suffer losses in your ecommerce business.
What is a Payment Gateway?
Let’s come to the payment gateway now. Online payment processing ecommerce sellers must know the details of the payment gateway they are signing up for. A payment gateway is the final bridge that helps connect your merchant account to your online store. This is the buyer facing element of the payment system in your ecommerce store.
A payment gateway is primarily responsible for taking the details of your customers regarding the order. For example, when a customer makes a payment, they need to enter their card number, netbanking id and password among other pins and codes. It is therefore the duty of the payment gateway to collect this information and redirect it to the bank. Once the payment is done, the customer is then redirected back to the ecommerce store.
There are a series of steps that occur at this point in time. Let’s take a look at them one by one-
Entering Details
The first step is asking the customer for details. Whenever making an online purchase you must have been asked to enter your name, card details, CVV, expiry date etc. This is the primary data based on which the payment will be charged to the customer. The payment gateway collects it from the customer.
Verification
The next step is the verification process. Payment verification is an important step without which any transaction is incomplete. The payment gateway is responsible for verifying the information entered by the customer. This is usually done by sending an OTP to the registered email id and phone number. The customer details are encrypted in the process, keeping them safe as the transfer takes place.
Processing the Payment
Once the details of the customer are verified, payment is then processed. This means that the payment gateway has successfully verified the details entered by the customer and is now willing to transfer the payment to the merchant’s business account.
Deposit and Redirection to the Store
Finally, the transfer of money from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s business account takes place. The customer therefore, pays for the order while the seller receives the money. This is where the online purchase is supposed to be successful. Once the payment transfer takes place, the customer is redirected to the ecommerce store.
How to Choose the Right Payment Gateway?
Once online payment processing ecommerce store owners know about the payment gateway, they have to make a choice. The choice comes in partnering with the payment gateway provider. Remember that it can be one of the biggest decisions for your business. Partnering with a bad payment gateway provider can lead to a lot of failed payments or fraudulent activities. Either ways it will be damaging the reputation of your online store.
If the payments fail very often, customers will not make an effort to purchase from your website. This is because nobody wants to get into the hassle of payments getting deducted from their bank account and order not being placed. Similarly, if fraudulent activities occur, your customer’s data could be at risk. Many cyberattackers steal customer’s bank information by creating a replica of the payment gateway window where customer details are entered. Alternatively, they might intervene in the transfer process and turn the payments away from your merchant account.
Therefore, make sure you partner with a reliable payment gateway. Look for their past clients and success rate. Don’t just settle for someone that offers you low transaction rates. In other words, do your research well.
Conclusion
Online payment processing ecommerce store owners must have all this information handy. This is because if you are planning to create your store from scratch, payment will have to be set up. You simply cannot do without it, no matter what. The more you know the details the better you will be prepared for making any decision. Once you understand how the merchant account and payment gateway is set up, you need to partner with the right service provider. Don’t take any decision in haste. Several ecommerce website builders provide you with a payment gateway option. Dash101 is a one stop solution that can help you set up your website as well as ship at the lowest costs. The key is to start leveraging the platform as soon as possible for maximum benefits!
