Selling On-Line..."E-Commerce"

How do you get your share of the action? Easy. You create a website that promotes your products, obtain an Internet address, hire space on a web-hosting company, upload your pages, add a payment system and then use various promotion services to get your site noticed.

In selling something you'll want to be paid as quickly, safely and painlessly as possible. Ecommerce now has many options. Starting with the simplest, these are:

1. Display your goods online, but take payment off-line — by check, bank transfer, credit card details given over the phone.
2. Display your goods online and take payment online through some simple wallet system.
3. Display and take payment online, but employ a payment service provider. A link to your shopping cart or catalogue will seamlessly transfer the customer to the payment provider for immediate card processing, transferring the customer back for you to handle the purchase. You can use your online merchant account if you possess one, but that is not required. The payment service provider will verify the credit card purchase, collect the payments, deduct the commissions, and send you the balance, usually by bank transfer monthly.
4. Display and take payment online, but use your own online merchant account, which you have obtained from your local bank or from a Merchant Account Provider.

Wondering how to link your site to the payment process? Links will be built in automatically if you use an out-of-the box shopping cart, employ a web design company, or rent space on an online ecommerce-hosting site. Otherwise, if you've built your own site, you'll have to add code to the pages concerned. With payment service providers that's fairly easy: they'll supply a snippet of code for you to paste in. Using your own merchant account, particularly if you're hosting the site on your own server, will require liaison with the credit card processing company, and good programming experience.