Dec. 31, 2012 -
PRLog -- The technological advancements released in the recent past especially wireless communication and internet in particular can enable a willing buyer and seller meet online; conduct the whole transaction of selling and buying online from any place without interacting physically. Merchants can now sell both on retail or wholesale their goods and services by using credit cards online. Some of the products that can be sold online include books and other publications, softwares and real estate. Some of the services that can be sold online include knowledge or expertise where a professional or expert can guide a learner online. For most of these transactions to be actualised, the merchant service provider usually has an ecommerce website.
The backbone behind these financial transactions is the use of
credit cards online (http://www.themerchantsolutions.com/
internet-telephone-
payment-solutions.html)
to make the payment. The merchant service provider posses a merchant account with the acquiring bank. The merchant can pursue the procedure directly to have the agreement with the acquiring bank or use a merchant account reseller to link the business to the bank. The merchant usually has an online shopping cart on the e-commerce website. An online shopping cart is a piece of e-commerce software on a web server that allows visitors to the merchant’s website to select items for eventual purchase. The shopping cart software is used to make a website's product catalogue available for online ordering, whereby visitors or the prospective customers may select, view, add/delete, and purchase merchandise.The online shopping cart allows online shopping customers to accumulate a list of items for purchase.This is referred to as placing items in the shopping cart or adding items to the shopping cart. When the customer checks out, the software typically calculates a total for the order, including shipping and handling (to cater for postage and packing) charges and the associated taxes, as applicable. The software typically provides a means of capturing a client's payment information. For clients using credit card the merchant relies on the software module of the secure gateway provider, in conjunction with the secure payment gateway, in order to conduct secure credit card online transactions. Some simple shopping carts strictly allow for an item to be added for the checkout process to start, however most shopping cart software provides additional features that an internet merchant uses to fully manage an online store.An online shopping cart normally has two components namely: the storefront and administration back end. Store front is the area of the web store that is accessed by visitors in this case the customer to the online shop. Categories, products, and other pages like search are dynamically generated by the software based on the information saved in the store database.
The look of the storefront can normally be changed by the store owner so that it merges with the rest of the merchant’s web site.Administration backend is the area of the web store that is accessed by the merchant to manage the online shop. The amount of store management features changes depending on the sophistication of the shopping cart software chosen by the merchant, but generally a store manager is able to add and edit products, categories, discounts, shipping and payment settings appropriately.For security of the transactions,the PCI security standards have regulations set in place to safeguard payment account data security. The council that develops and monitors these regulations is composed of the leading providers in the payment industry like American Express, Discover Financial Services, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. They define the best practices for storing, transmitting, and handling of sensitive information over the internet.
About the author:
The Merchants Solutions understand the grow need for
online shopping cart (
http://www.themerchantsolutions.com/credit_card_terminals...). We have therefore improvised several ways to enable merchants accept online payments.
