How to become an Online Merchant?

To become an online merchant you need the facility of accepting credit cards online through your website. If you don’t have this facility, your visitor will not be able to pay for the products that they buy from your website and you will be struggling to make sales. You may plan to accept payment offline such as cheques and money transfer methods, but the main intended of internet business is fast and convenient. Sending a cheque through the post and realizing it may takes nearly a month, specially your customers are from overseas. Money transfer methods just give more troubles to your customers and that is clearly a wasting of customers time and not convenient at all. So, the easiest way to get money and make sales is proving the facility for your customers to pay by their credit cards.

To accept credit cards, you need to acquire the Merchant status. Without this you cannot accept major credit cards. Getting the merchant status is very simple process through online merchant agents such as PayPal, 2Checkout and World-Pay. You can visit these merchant sites and register for their service. They will give you all the instructions to setup and use it with your website.

These companies will charge a small percentage from your sales, but the initial value to setup a payment gateway with these agents is very cost effective. PayPal provides many options for free and others will charge a very small amount to setup the merchant account for you.

You can also setup a payment gateway of your own, without consulting a merchant agent. For this, you will need to consult your credit card agent or merchant bank that offers online merchant facilities. Then you will need to pay an annual subscription payment, even you make sales or not.

There is another advantage of using an agent for credit card processing, that is you don’t want to worry about getting SSL (Secure Socket Layer), for your web server. SSL is an internet protocol, which secure transactions between user and the web server. This is a must for your website, since credit card details are very sensitive and transaction should be made in encrypted mode. Now days, SSL offers 128bit encryption, which is considered unbreakable with the present processing power of computers. When you setup an account with agent companies, they will provide you the SSL facilities with the setup of your merchant account.