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Developing a website: Transacting online

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Developing a website: Transacting online

Depending on your objectives for the site, and how ‘e-commerce’ friendly your product or service is, transacting online can be enormously beneficial to your business. Whether you are looking to increase revenues, or reduce the costs of doing business, often using web-based technologies can drastically improve your business’ effectiveness when done properly.

There are a few different ways to accept orders and perform credit card payments.

DIY - secure order acceptance, where the merchant performs the credit card transactions manually through existing facility. This has the lowest setup and running cost, and is recommended to new online merchants with an unproven transaction volume. Existing bank merchant facility required.
The order/shopping is performed on your site, but the credit card details are accepted and processed on a third-party server. The third party credit card payment facility can be obtained from banks directly (Commonwealth bank's CommWeb, Westpac's WebPac, etc) or an Internet processing company such as worldpay.com or paypal.com. No existing bank merchant facility required.
For larger transaction volume, and full back-end integration functionality, a credit card processing gateway can be installed on your server. Such services are provided by third-parties such as Camtech, securepay.com.au, purecommerce.com.au and some banks. Existing bank merchant facility required.

If your project is more complex (i.e. it integrates with internal systems, or you will be using it for more than direct-to-customer e-commerce), talk to your developer about developing your own payment system. There are advantages to this system, given there are set up costs and ongoing commissions when outsourcing a payment gateway.

Given some customers are still concerned about credit card security (even though the heaviest encryption is now employed by most sites, and credit card institutions have fraud refund policies), it may be prudent to set up alternative payment methods such as COD, Cheque and phone orders. This kind of differentiation will also indicate your commitment to delivering a secure and efficient service to your customers.

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