Different Ways to Accept Credit Cards in Your Business - Part 3

The third way to accept credit cards from your customers is through your website. This is quickly becoming a very popular way for businesses to securely take payments from customers. These are the things you need for a business website. It is the way that you accept credit cards online. You might say, "I can't do that because I don't know how". To that I would say, you don't need to know a lot to set this up for your business. If you want some help with it just send me an email at john@provinc.net and I can help you or read on and I'll tell you how. First, you have obviously got to have a website with an online shopping cart integrated into it. That's actually very easy. Just go to a website called the http://www.thetemplatestore.com/. On this site you will be able to select and purchase a website template(they have lot's to choose from!), that has a shopping cart already built into it. Cost is about $150 for the template. You will also have to have a place to host your website, so people can find your store on the web. You can talk to the guys at http://www.godaddy.com/ or http://www.tierranet.net/ about that, they will help you and it's inexpensive.

You will receive instructions with your website template about how to load the information into your online shopping cart. You can do that yourself or send us an email and we will assist you. You will need to think about some words to put into your website template that will tell your website visitors about your products.

You will need an online payment portal integrated into your business website, so that people can securely and safely put their credit card numbers into your shopping cart to buy your products. Just email me when you get ready for that and Provision, Inc will sell you a license for Authorize.net. The license costs $25. We will integrate it into your shopping cart. Provision will also help you to setup a merchant account, so you can recive payments from your customers. This account is required to take credit cards from your customers. This should get your business online!

Different Ways to Accept Credit Cards in Your Business - Part 2

The second way that you can take credit cards from customers who want to buy your products is through a shopping cart on your website. You will have your products displayed in the shopping cart, so that customers can select what they would like to buy from your store. After they have put the products they want to purchase into your electronic shopping cart, they will select the "Checkout" button, so they can pay you. Once they have affirmed the products that they want to buy, they will select the payment option of "Credit card". Your shopping cart will have a connection to a payment portal, like Authorize.net. This portal will do several things for you. First it will encrypt each transaction so that it can be safely transmitted to the banking system for settlement. Next it will send the transaction to your merchant account, so that your money can be collected from the purchaser. It makes it real easy to get your money. The money will be deposited directly into you business checking account. If you do not have a presence on the web to sell your products, you might want to think about doing it. Provision, Inc can setup the Autorize.net payment portal and get your merchant account started, so you can sell your products online. This will give you a secure way to accept credit cards online.

Different Ways to Accept Credit Cards in Your Business - Part 1

As you already know accepting credit cards from your customers is almost necessary for staying in business. The traditional way to accept credit cards and debit cards is by using one of the many credit card terminals that are available. A program is loaded into your credit card terminal based on the kind of business that you have. This program verifyes and submits to the banking system the credit card transactions that you create by using the terminal. Retail businesses have a program that is created for that type of business. Restaurants have a program in the terminal that handles not only payments for food orders, but also the tips that the wait staff receives. There is some variation in the credit and debit card processing that is done by the traditional credit card terminal based on the kind of business you have. If you use a crdit card terminal in your business to accept credit and debit cards from customers and you think the program in your terminal is not the correct one, please contact me at Provision, Inc at john@provinc.net. I can help you correct this problem and probably save you some money.

Save on Processing Fees by Using a Pinpad

One of the easiest ways to save on processing fees for credit cards and debit cards in your store is to use a pinpad and have the right program installed in your credit card terminal. You are accepting credit cards and debit cards from your customers. This gives them secure ways to pay you for your products in your store. A lot of store owners do not realize that when a customer gives them a debit card to pay for products, the transaction created by the debit card is processed at a credit card discount rate if they don't have card acceptance setup to process debit cards correctly. The correct and least expensive way to accept and process debit cards as debit cards, is to have a program installed in you credit card terminal that will know the difference between a credit card and a debit card. You also have to have a pinpad on your checkout counter so that customers can enter their pin numbers into it. When a debit card is processed this way, the money is transferred directly from the customer's account into your business account. More importantly you generally pay less for the debit card transaction than you do for a credit card transaction. So the two main benefits of the debit card transaction are you get your money faster and you pay less for the processing. Something to consider.

What is the Reason for Your Business Website?

A lot of businesses have websites on the www these days. And there are many more being posted to servers as the days go by. It is really amazing to look at them. Most of them are just fancy advertisements that are available on the web. To me this seems to be a waste of money and time, if the website is put up by a business that has products that it is trying to sell to a marketplace. Most of the owners of these sites do not understand that the visiblity of a website in the online marketplace is created by the same methods that are used to make your brick and mortar store visible to the marketplace on the street. Both of these have to be effectively promoted or advertised to the market, so that purchasers will know that they exist. Having a potential purchaser of your products know how to get to your store, where you will sell them quality products is very important. So also is it necessary for you to make a potential online purchaser of your products aware of the location of your website, and the quality products that are sold there.

No it is not the case that everyone who wants to buy a pen and pencil set will be able to find your website just because it is on the web. You must make your site friendly to the search engines by building it around keywords that online purchasers would use to look for your site. It seems like a lot of website owners do not understand that the promotion of their sites through the search engines is the effective way to get online customers.

E-commerce means an Online Shopping Cart

To add e-commerce capability to your website you will add an online shopping cart to your website. Putting a shopping cart on the your website will allow you to accept credit cards online. The easiest way to have the shopping cart available in your website is to purchase a website template that already has the shopping cart built into it. You can get a very nice one online in the price range of $ 150 to $ 250. This may seem that the website template that you purchase is a little expensive, but the extra expense is well worth it, if the cart is already integrated with the website template. There are a lot of templates available in the price range of $15 to $50, but these don't usually have an integrated shopping cart. If you purchase a web template that does not have a cart with it, don't worry; there are lots of carts that can be easily integrated into an existing web template.

There are many variations of shopping carts available in many different price ranges. You will want to select the shopping cart for your website that best suits the products that you are selling. If you are selling only one or two products, you should be able to find a free shopping cart. There are other shopping carts that are better suited to online stores that have many categories of products to sell. These carts allow you to categorize your products into groups so that customers can easily locate items that they want to purchase. The most important part of the shopping cart is its ability to allow customers to pay for the products that you have for sale, right through the shopping cart. You should have a shopping cart that will allow customers to purchase your products with credit card. When you think about it, the only reason you have an online shopping cart is the accpet credit cards from customers. Credit card transactions are extremely secure through the website. And you should make credit card payments available to customers so they can pay throught the website. It will be necessary for you to have a merchant account with the correct discount rate to be able to take credit card payments through your website. You can find companies that sell shopping carts in Provision, Inc.'s Resource web pageson this website.

You will have to have a payment portal, like Authorize.net, installed in your website so that customers can use their credit cards for payment. It is easy to get the portal, you will pay a one-time license fee for the portal, then you will have to pay a monthly gateway access fee to use the portal. Provision, Inc can help you get the portal for your website. Please visit our website for more information.

A Well Designed Website is Easy to Get

You can spend thousands to hire a website developer to build this site for your business. You can also go the much cheaper route, and quite frankly, the route that is easier to control, by selecting and purchasing a quality web template. There are thousands of sellers of website templates on the Internet. You can find several excellent online businesses that sell website templates on the Website Templates page in the Reources section of this website.

The selection process and associated development of a web template is not as difficult as you think. The web developer who built the template that you are going to buy for your business has already done all of the hard work. They have selected the color scheme that works together, added a menu system, and several web pages. What you contribute to this website is the appropriate text that describes the products and/or services that you have to sell and how these will benefit the purchaser. Usually these templates come with excellent directions that were put together by the developer, explaining how to add text and/or pictures to the pages and menus. Most of the time you can use Windows Notepad or any text editor to write the text that you want to add to your web pages. These templates range in cost from the very inexpensive ($15 to $20) to the very expensive. It depends on your budget. You will need to follow the directions that the template developer gives you in the “readme” file that comes with the website template that you purchase. This “readme” file contains the procedure you need to use in adding information to your new template.

Levels of Risk and Associated Discount Rates

Risk and credit card processing rates have a practical connection. Quite simply, the higher the risk, the higher the cost of processing a credit card transaction. The risk of acceptance of a credit card from a customer is determined by the circumstance of the acceptance. Let’s look at some examples. The qualified rate is the rate with the lowest risk. The low risk factor is determined by the fact that the credit card is present at the point-of-sale when the purchase is made. The customer gives the credit card to your clerk. Your clerk swipes the credit card through your credit card terminal. This creates an electronic transaction that is successfully transmitted by the terminal to the merchant bank for processing. Optionally, the address for the credit card number can be verified in a large database. If the address is found the transaction will receive the qualified rate.

The next level of risk for a credit card transaction is what is called mid-qualified. In this case the customer gives the credit card to your clerk at the point-of-sale and your clerk swipes it through your credit card terminal. But for some reason, the terminal cannot “read” the card when it is swiped. Your clerk must then enter the bankcard number into the keypad of the terminal to create the transaction. When the transaction is sent to the merchant bank, the address verification is successful, so the transaction is assigned a mid-qualified rate. There is a little higher risk for this transaction because the credit card number was keyed into the terminal, rather than being “read” when it was swiped.

The third, and last, level of risk is the non-qualified level. This risk level is assigned in more than one circumstance for a transaction. In this case the customer gives the credit card to your clerk to swipe through your terminal. The credit card number is either successfully “read” by the terminal or the credit card number can be keyed into the terminal. But the address verification is NOT successful for this transaction. Then this transaction would be assigned the highest risk or a non-qualified rate. The non-qualified rate is also assigned to some corporate and foreign bankcards. This is done because the address verification for these credit card numbers is NOT successful. This rate is also sometimes called the “card not present” rate because it is applied to transactions that you might receive through your website or over the phone. These are instances when the card is not available to be swiped or keyed into your terminal.

What Kind of Merchant Account Do you Need

When you are getting ready to get a merchant account for your business you will usually find that you can get such an account through an Independent Sales Organization ("ISO"). This ISO, who has agreements with merchant banks, will help you fill out an agreement that goes to a merchant bank for underwriting. Getting one of these merchant accounts is a lot like getting a loan from a bank. You have to fill out the application and then let underwriting at the bank review the data you put on the application. They will decide whether your business is worthy of a merchant account, based on the information that you give them in the application

As technology has moved on, it is now necessary to decide what kind of merchant account your business requires. If you have a storefront where you sell products to customers who visit your store, then you would need a point-of-sale ("POS") merchant account. If you have an online business, you would need an Internet merchant account. Some businesses have two merchant accounts, one for the store and one for the website. Of course you will be using different technology to accept credit cards in a store than what you will use to take credit cards through a website. In the store you will use a credit card terminal to "swipe" most of the credit cards. On the website you will use a payment portal to accept secure credit card transactions through the website. Both of these technologies are very secure in protecting the credit card transactions as they are electronically submitted to the banking system.