An e-commerce website needs to have certain features for being a successful online business. One such feature is the ability to accept credit card payments for products and services offered on your website.
Basically, you can select from two options:
a. Setup your own merchant account with a bank
b. Sign an agreement with a third party credit card payment facility
A major benefit of setting up your own merchant account is that you can pay a lower credit card fee on each transaction processed. Depending on the issuer of credit card, this fee may range from 1.5% to 4%. Usually, American Express and Discover will charge you more than Visa and MasterCard. The shortcoming of setting up a merchant account is that it can cost you about $1500 upfront for the fees, software and equipment for dialup and processing through your computer.
An effective alternative is to process your payments via a third party payment facility that will charge you from 6% to 15% on every transaction. According to the number of transactions and dollar amount that you will be handling, this may actually be a good way to setup a merchant account that pays for itself in the form of saved transaction fees.
Other fee or charges that may be associated with your merchant account include transaction fee, monthly statement fees, minimum traffic fees, charge-back fees and more. The transaction fee is charged by the merchant provider to cover their costs of network usage, equipment, etc. you must not hesitate to ask for the complete list of features and fees before signing up for an e-commerce web hosting account.
There are plenty of advantages of setting up your merchant account through an e-commerce web hosting company. Don’t forget to compare various web hosting providers before making a selection for your e-commerce website. This way, you can surely find the turnkey solution that includes everything needed for accepting credit card payments online.
Some of the essential features to be considered while choosing an e-commerce web hosting company include:
1. Free instant set-up
2. Real-time credit card processing
3. Shopping cart software
4. Secure payment gateway
5. Web designing tools
6. Secure server certificate
7. Unlimited products capacity
8. Web control panel
9. Support for VeriSign, PayPal, etc
10. Website statistics software
11. Sound e-commerce support service
12. Web marketing tools
13. Import/export data to your accounting software
14. Real-time shipping system
15. Automated shipping calculation through FedEx, UPS and USPS
16. Upto 90 day money back guarantee
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