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Accepting Credit Card Payments Online

No matter what you're selling on your online shop you will need a way of getting money from your customers. With a Stylus e-commerce solution you have many ways of accepting payment.

Customers come to your online shop and after filling up their shopping cart with products they wish to purchase, they go through the checkout procedure. After entering all their billing and delivery details they are then given the choice of how they would like to pay.

You can specify the options open to your customers; you can let them pay by cheque/postal order, telephone, fax and of course via credit card online.

Accepting credit cards over the internet is a scary topic but in all reality it's very simple and easy to setup and manage, it all comes down to your current situation


I Already Have a Credit Card Merchant Account

If your business already has a credit card merchant account and therefore can already take and process credit cards then there is nothing stopping you using our secure server to take and encrypt the credit cards details and then manually feeding these into your own PDQ machine. This has the benefit that there is no extra expense, although you may need to confirm with your bank that you are okay to process e-commerce sales through your account.

If you have a merchant account and would rather everything is done automatically for you online, or your bank insists that you do everything online through a separate payment gateway then you can use one of many online payment gateways to automatically process the transaction.

All you need to do is provide the payment gateway with your merchant account number and they will handle the rest, the money will automatically be deposited in your bank account once the transaction has gone through.

There are many companies who offer this service and its worth taking a look at a few to see who offers the best rates, these companies include Protx and SECPay.


I don't have the facility to take Credit Card Payments

If you can't already take credit cards then you have various options open to you, the obvious one is to go to your local bank and apply for a merchant account however this can take a long time and if you have no trading history then chances are they won't want to touch you.

The other option is to get an account with an online payment processor. There are many companies such as WorldPay and even PayPal (who are free) who offer this facility.

An online payment processor basically processes the credit cards and for each transaction they take a small percentage or fee. For example for every transaction you put through you might get charged 4.5%.

Once the transaction has gone through and cleared they wire the money into your bank account.

A Stylus e-commerce store can be integrated with most payment gateways and online processors.

The entire process (from a customer's side) is very simple, they simply enter all their details and then enter their payment details and the order is complete.

If you need any help in choosing a payment provider please feel free to contact us and our support team will be happy to help.