Recently I received a phone call about setting up an online merchant account for an educational consulting firm. Since they had a ton of questions, I thought that my email response to them could serve as a quick template for a more detailed treatment here for how to set up an online merchant account.
Issues For Accepting Credit Cards Online
As a brief overview, here are the questions/issues you need to figure out BEFORE signing up for any service:
- shopping cart/online catalog
- product “type” (i.e. physical delivery, digital, etc.), and fulfillment
- database/customer list integration
- integration with gateway
- merchant account set up
Shopping Cart/Online Catalog
The first involves whether you need a full fledged online catalog, or whether you’ll have a page on your site and just need the “add to cart” buttons added.
There are 2 choices here, software of using a web service. I prefer the 2nd option, and there are attractive low cost options available. The choice you make will ultimately determine whether or not you’ll need a SSL certificate.
More likely than not the answer will be yes. But one option (e-junkie) operates such that it isn’t required on your end.
Product Type
Next, whether you need to host digital products for immediate download. Also, will you fulfill the orders yourself, or use an outside fulfillment company?
Why does the distinction matter? Well, because some cart solutions work great for digital downloads, even hosting your content and providing unlimited bandwidth for product downloads.
Bandwidth matters if you’re selling more than one a day. Think of bandwidth as the number of lanes on a highway. The last thing you need on your site is a traffic jam as people line up ready to pay. In fact, most internet marketers understand this problem all too well, as product launches drive thousands of customers to their cart at one time.
Anyway, though most shopping cart solutions can handle physical products, if you are using a fulfillment center to actually handle packaging and shipping you’ll want to make sure that email notifications of sale go to you AND the fulfillment center.
So just be sure of all the possible angles (and places where things can get screwed up) BEFORE you purchase your shopping cart.
Database Integration
The third on whether or not you want to generate and maintain a list of customers for follow on marketing. Now, this is a marketing point that does impact what we’re talking about here.
In fact, I discussed this very issue on my Success Marketing, LLC website in an article called “Integration Marketing.”
Needless to say, it should be apparent that it is easier to sell products and/or services to existing clients than going out and continually needing to find new ones.
Yet, time and again we see people who simply don’t have a customer database, don’t track online sales, and have no way of doing follow up marketing to those who have already bought from them.
And that’s a huge mistake.
Not to mention lost opportunity and revenue.
So, make sure you have the capability in place to capture your customer’s contact info after the sale. And make sure that data links seamlessly to your database so you can market to them on a regular basis.
Got it?
Gateway Set Up
Integration with gateway. Depending on how we work out issue #1 determines the appropriate gateway that will link with your cart solution.
Now, I discussed merchant account and gateway integration in an earlier post. You might want to check it out. The key point is to understand that your cart and gateway need to link together seamlessly.
Not all gateways link to all carts. Some are proprietary. Some are limited. If you already have a merchant account provider and they offer gateway services, then find a cart that will work with them (or switch to someone who can link with your cart if it matters that much to you).
Get this worked out BEFORE plunking down some money on a cart you can’t use.
Merchant Account Set Up
Finally, merchant account set up (i.e. actually processing payments). Actually this is the easiest part of the entire process. The only “trick” is to make sure your account is configured with your gateway. After all, you need to get paid at the end of the day.
Online Merchant Account Next Steps
Hopefully this article clarified some issues for you. Now, the question is, what do you do with all this information? If you need more info, have a comment or question to share, or just want to share your experiences feel free to leave a comment here.
You can also contact us if you need more “hands on” help getting started. Additionally, since we offer merchant account audits, if you’ve been in business for a couple of years it is definitely worth getting a review of your costs and fees.
Over the past three years we’ve saved business owners an average of 15.7% on their merchant account fees.
