E Commerce
Today most websites not only promote products but also sell online, this trend will continue well into the future and create opportunities like never before for small business. There is a certain stigma surrounding people using credit cards online, however this will slowly change as the internet gains the trust of purchasers and people become more familiar with using the internet to purchase goods. If you ever have any doubts about this just consider Ebay and its success.

You don’t have to have a shop front to sell anymore, a nice clean site, good products and your up and running. We have selected some of the most common questions and answers to help you with the challenges of E commerce and considerations for you online business.


Type of Product
Firstly, let’s look at the type of product you are thinking of selling, what is the price range and are you going for quantity over quality? These are all considerations when choosing how you are going to take payments and the best type of system for you.


Paymate and Paypal
We promote Paymate and Paypal as a Credit Card processing providers; Their services mainly focuses on small to medium turnovers, and start up sites. For example, when you get your site built, you will still have to wait for you marketing campaigns to bring in the qty’s of buyers you will need to make high end turnover. So most site owners choose to start off with Paymate then go over to a full banking merchant account once the monthly turn over reaches a certain point.

A Paymate or Paypal account can be set up in literally minutes and all of our systems are already built to handle full integration. This is a cost effective solution as you can start with a free account and pay a minor fee per sale.


Merchant Account
To setup a merchant account that links to a bank, you will firstly need to open an account with the bank and be approved, you with then pay fees to keep the account operational. After this you will need to sign up with a gateway provider who will connect your website to the bank, and they will also charge you a fee. Finally you will need to get your web designer (us?) to build in the Credit card gate and SSL connection, which again will cost for development and SSL fees.

With Paymate and Paypal it is all built in and at next to no cost. (Now you can see why we promote it)


Phone Sales
It is also very important to note that trending information has shown us that customers buying off websites tend to use the site to choose the product then ring the business and pay for the product over the phone. So why waste money on fees and charges!

Of course if you are going to start making major sales straight away and have a massive marketing campaign to launch your site, we then suggest to go with a merchant account.

For more information please feel free to contact us, we would be happy to talk you through the different alternatives