Reliable Payment System (Part 2 – 5 essential elements of an Ecommerce Website)
17 Aug 2009This is part two of the series: 5 essential elements that form the backbone of your ecommerce website. You can check out part one here.
Essential Element 2: Reliable Payment System
A secure and reliable Payment system is the most important aspect of your website. If you are selling products online then you will have to make sure that your website never crashes between transactions, people find your products easily and, most importantly, that they are able to trust you with their sensitive information.
| A payment system has two aspects: a. Shopping Cart- Shopping carts are the face of your purchasing system. The more facilitated, faster and convenient your shopping cart is, the higher chances of you making a sale. Three most basic things to remember about a shopping cart are: 1. It should be intuitive 2. It should be crash proof and, 3. It should integrate with the product inventory, immaculately Failure to achieve any of the above would adversely affect the efficacy of your website. |
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Now, you can add as much functionality in your cart as you want- coupon codes support, RSS capability, recommend-related-items functionality, integrated customer reviews, product sharing and recommendations, multiple images support – but it’s important to make sure that the cart doesn’t take too long to load. A better coded shopping cart should be able to modularize functionality and load faster.
| b. A Payment gateway-
The best possible way to ensure reliability to your customers is to use a Payment gateway. A payment gateway is a third party service that automates the transaction between the shopper and the merchant; the gateway will take all the important information required to process the transaction from the customer and, use it to make the payment to the merchant. |
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The process spares the merchant from any liability of customers’ sensitive information being lost or compromised. Most Payments Gateways, such as PayPal, Authorize.net etc are similar in performance and thus your decision to choose a payment gateway requires a much closer look.
It’s always a good idea to research before committing to any one of them; always be aware of your gateway’s policies in situations such as theft, stolen information and wrong transactions and keep your merchant and payment gateway accounts separate. This provides you the flexibility of using a PG best suited to the shopping cart software used on your website while using some other PG for your merchant accounts.
Sources: www.practicalecommrce.com
