Payment Methods - Credit card Processing Issues

When setting up for online payment transactions, choose the appropriate payment software and acquire the merchant account information for your company. After obtaining the merchant account information from your financial institution, you are ready to implement the payment software, whether you are using credit cards or digital cash.
Some of the companies listed in the Resources page provide downloadable testing versions of their software. During the evaluation and testing of your online transaction payment software, make sure that Internet access is available to the payment gateway at the payment software site.

International currency transactions can be handled by a number of vendors. When an organization provides international sales, several issues emerge. These include language and currency translation issues. When you create a merchant account with a financial institution, make sure that this institution can process multiple currencies. Online transaction payment software must be able to translate the client's currency into the merchant's (your organization's) preferred currency automatically. Each vendor will provide detailed information on the installation and configuration of its own payment software. Online credit card transactions save human resources, allow for automatic validation, and provide a convenient and relatively secure means of payment.

Many e-commerce sites have to deal extensively with taxes levied by governments local to the e-commerce customer. Such issues may concern individual states and provinces or entire countries. Your payment gateway options should take such issues into account. Ideally, the software will do this work for you automatically. However, you may need to create custom solutions that may involve the manual calculation of fees.

IBM's Net.Commerce and Microsoft's Site Server E-Commerce Edition provide ways to configure and manage online transactions. No matter what software you decide to use, you should ensure that it provides industry-standard options as well as an interface that you and your employees feel comfortable using. Standard options include the ability to log all transactions, trace user activity, engage in currency translation, and work with many different merchant banks. Remember, you will have to work with this payment gateway software, and it must interface well with the payment gateway operated by the merchant. In the next lesson, you will learn about digital cash.