Online Commerce: What You Need to Know

Building an online commerce site requires multiple elements to be successful. One of the key elements is setting up a system for credit card processing. This will allow you the ability to accept credit card payments online without the need of a swipe machine. Another crucial part of the process is setting up a payment gatewayso your transactions will know where to go when processed. Like what bank the money withdrawn from customer's credit card will go.

Once you have a payment gateway setup, credit card processing becomes easy. Normally on a website, the transaction will sit in queue waiting your approval. The credit card number can only be seen before you process the transaction. Once you process the transaction, the system delete's all except the last four of the credit card number. This is so you cannot have a record of past credit card numbers, as this is a major security risk.

Once the transaction has been processed, the next step is to access your payment gateway. You want to make sure the credit card hasn't been declined for any reason. Decline messages will show up with an error number that can easily be referenced. Some errors will be obvious like, "Invalid Expiration Date", or "Invalid Address". These are usually customer error, and you will need to contact them to get the correct information.

When initially creating your website, it's likely that you will receive orders before you have credit card processing setup on the site. Orders processed before the integration of the gateway in your site cannot be automatically processed. Therefore once you get the gateway setup, these orders can be processed manually. When processing manually, the form to fill out in the gateway is much like the one you see when you checkout on a website. Usually you will need the CVV2 code to process manually which you will need to get from the customer who purchased the order.

When in the payment gateway, you can also setup FRISK management. FRISK management prevents customers who accidentally hit the back button on their browser after initiating the transaction, and create a duplicate transaction. If the two transactions are between minutes of each other, the system will deny the second transaction so the card doesn't get charged twice. If the customer wants two of the same thing, they should be updating the quantity in the initial transaction, rather than making two separate transactions for the same item.
When building an ecommerce website, you need to be sure you have all of the tools you need. Online credit card processing is crucial. No one is going to send you a check in the mail. A payment gateway is important to have so the transactions know where to go, and if something happens to the transaction, you can process the cards manually. Keep these key factors in mind when building your ecommerce website.

Jason Ausmus is a web content producer for Innuity. For more information regarding credit card processing or a payment gateway, look to Merchant Partners