In today’s world, being able to accept credit cards on your website is a standard part of doing business. After all, people love being able to head online and buy anything they want, without having to leave the comforts of home.

But you can’t just have any ol’ payment processor. Your online credit card acceptance procedure will never succeed if it doesn’t include these 3 things:

1. 24/7 tech support

If you don’t have a merchant provider that offers total merchant services — especially tech support that’s available 24/7 — you’re dealing with the wrong one.

After all, the web never closes! Anytime your online credit card acceptance capabilities aren’t working properly, you’re passing up money! You simply don’t have the luxury of sitting around, waiting for your merchant services provider to get back into the office, so that you can work out some technical issue.

2. State-of-the-art security tools

Even if your website is physically able to accept credit card payments, that doesn’t mean your customers will feel comfortable punching in their sensitive financial information. After all, we live in a world where identity theft and credit card fraud run rampant. If your website doesn’t have the very best security tools, you’ll never be able to accept credit cards like you should. Instead, people will head elsewhere — like to a competitor that takes their security more seriously.

So, what kind of security measures do you need?

If you want to accept credit card payments and have your customers feel safe doing it, you’ll need state-of-the-art encryption and fraud monitoring services. And, if you’re getting total merchant services from your provider, you can even include “extras” — like credit card information that can only be seen by a few people at your company, instead of every employee that logs into the website to fill orders.

3. A payment processor that’s easy-to-use

Just because your online credit card acceptance procedure is safe doesn’t mean it’s easy. And if you don’t make things easy on your customers, they’ll never buy from you!

If you want to accept credit card payments on a regular basis, you’ll need online forms that are easy to understand and easy to fill out. Plus, you’ll want to restrict the information you ask for. If you ask for a ton of information — that you really don’t need, or that your customers think you don’t need — you’ll wind up turning a lot of them off. Make your customers feel aggravated, and you’ll wind up with far fewer of them!