Ecommerce businesses are experiencing explosive growth within the last decade. If you are a business only doing ecommerce sales or a brick and mortar business considering expansion by adding ecommerce, accepting credit cards and other forms of online payments is a must. Increasingly complicated online payment processing world, how do you choose the right one for your ecommerce business or a small business credit card processing?
Ability to accept all major credit cards
By now you may have heard the phrase “not all major credit cards are equal.” They have different fee structures, certain limitations and others. But no matter what you need to accept all forms of credit and debit cards because you will be faced with customers that are widely different from one another. At a minimum your ecommerce merchant account should consider accepting widely used credit cards including Visa, Master Card, Discover and American Express. All these cards have different requirements. Some may not take high risk businesses that include adult services, gambling, online pharmacies and many others.

Security of transaction processing

This is important to protect your customers as well as your business. Almost all services use encryption to protect sensitive card data such as the credit card number, cardholder information and expiration date of the card. Payment gateways link your order or buy page to the merchant services account and the credit card securely. This is what protects you and the customer from hackers. Look into security of transaction processing measures adopted by the ecommerce credit card processing.

Fee structure

Understand that everyone has a different fee structure. Some charges a flat rate while others charge a percentage. Also, what you sell may come into the picture when deciding what fees your ecommerce merchant account has to pay. A single $100 transaction could cost you $2.75 because there are many steps involved in the transaction processing and each one has a fee. A typical transaction involves the payment gateway, the acquiring bank’s processor, the credit card interchange, the customer’s credit card issuer, and the merchant services (your bank) from the point a customer click “buy” to complete the transaction. Each one has a per transaction fee attached to their service.

On the go payment acceptance and possibility to connect to your accounting

These are two important links. More and more people are using smartphones and mobile devices to buy products online. So ecommerce credit card processing service you choose should be able to process these transactions. Another important factor is the ability to import data to your accounting system so that it could save time and money for your business. Consider services of www.charge.com.