If you’d like to create a shopping cart online or simply accept credit card payments, you’ve come to the right place! Chicago Web Management has experience using OSCommerce, Open Cart, and Magento shopping systems for your online business. These tools handle everything from product management, order management, inventory and shipping. Contact us to learn how we can help your business generate or improve online sales.
Step One: Merchant Account Setup
You’ll need to setup a merchant account online if you don’t have one with your business bank. Many business banking accounts do NOT have an online component. This is necessary to ensure funds are processed to your bank account securely. There are hundreds of Merchant Account Providers, but we think Stripe and BluePay has the best rates and level of customer service.
Step Two: Payment Gateway Setup
The Payment Gateway is a necessary step to ensure the integrity of the transaction (is the buyer who they say they are? will the transaction be secure while this data is in transit?) and their role is to act as an impartial provider for security of your transactions. They will handle the data from the web site through the buyer’s bank and hand off the transaction to your Merchant Account. We recommend Authorize.net for our clients. They are the market leader.
Step Three: Secure Your Site
Your web site must have SSL installed if you wish to ensure the safety of your data and store transactions. There are numerous packages available, and most hosting companies provide their own setup. We recommend Verisign, a leader in SSL Certificates.
To learn more, go here: https://www.verisign.com/
Step Four: Testing
We will configure your store with test products and go through the transaction process with you to ensure a smooth delivery of the store. Once its in place, we’ll turn off the ‘testing’ process with the Merchant Account and the Payment Gateway and you’ll be live and ready to take credit card orders from anywhere in the world!
Step Five: Launch!
Once the site is live, we’ll help you promote it and track the store’s growth. We’ll keep you appraised of issues and give you timely advice on how to handle growth. We have helped many stores get online and also grow online. Contact us to learn how we can help take your business to the next level in e-commerce.
Alternate E-commerce: Paypal
For stores that will be selling less than 4 items per month, or the cost of sales is too low, we recommend PayPal and can configure your site to use this option. Once sales reaches a certain point, it will be economically better for you to go to the proper e-commerce route, but for smaller vendors, Paypal is a great stepping-stone. Contact us for details.