Choosing an e-commerce shopping cart is a big decision. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar business, your website is your only chance to impress potential customers. It must project a professional image to the trust of your visitors to capture. The cart is a particularly important part of your website because it’s about people? S personal information and credit card numbers. People are nervous about online purchases and to ensure that they give their credit card numbers to a reputable company.
There Different types of ecommerce shopping carts available. They range from Merchant Services, which no programming skills required, to fully integrated shopping carts that require custom programming. The three main categories of shopping carts are:
Merchant services such as eBay and 2Checkout
Hosted cart services
Fully carts
Merchant Services
Most integrated shopping carts that require your own merchant account and gateway. A merchant account is a bank that a credit card company to transact and allows the gateway allows the transaction to be executed via a secure connection. It? Is okay if you do not? T a merchant account or gateway. Merchant service shopping carts can be their merchant account, gateway and shopping cart use for a higher cost.
Merchant useful, for very small businesses or who are just getting started and don? T have many orders. Merchant services provide the merchant account, gateway, hosted shopping cart and maintain your customer? S personal information. They usually require a set-up fee between $ 200 and 50, the transaction costs between 30 and 75 cents, and 5% to 10% of each transaction. Because you use their merchant account, your customer? S credit card statement will show the merchant services business name not yours to show. In some cases customers will not recognize the charge and may challenge it.
Merchant service carts an administrative interface that allows you to log into your account to products, prices and shipping options to add. The shopping cart generates the html for the purchase buttons and you simply copy and paste the html into your web pages. When your customer clicks on the button to buy, he went to another site to enter credit card details. This gives the client that a small company. Some potential customers will give the shopping cart rather than enter their credit card information on a site they know nothing about.
Once your business grows to the point where you are processing over $ 1000 per month, it? S more cost effective to fit your own merchant account and switch to either a hosted shopping cart (little or no programming) or a fully integrated shopping cart (programming required).
Hosted Cart
The hosted Shopping cart is a great solution for a small company that is the processing of more than $ 1000 per month, but not not have the means to create or customize a fully integrated shopping cart. Hosted shopping carts are similar to the merchant services because they have an administrative interface for your products, prices and shipping options to enter. They will generate the html for the purchase buttons, which can be copied and pasted into your html pages.
Hosted shopping carts are some of the same problems as merchant service carts because your customers will be transferred to another site to the credit card information to enter. Some hosted shopping carts, use the size that it has the same look and feel as your websites. Customizing your shopping cart may require some programming, but it can also prevent customers from leaving their shopping carts.
Eunis Hilliger is a certified Authorizenet Emulator specialist and assists credit card processing companies.