Accepting Credit Cards Online for Your Online Business

When you’re doing business online, you will find that having a merchant account is extremely valuable. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, however, the following scenario tops the list.

Let’s say that you have a customer who visits your online business. Maybe you sell books, or software, or clothing, or sporting goods - in this example, what you sell isn’t an important part of the equation - whatever it is, your customer adds products to the shopping cart and is ready to check out. There are three things that can happen:

Your customer gets to the checkout page and finds out that you don’t accept credit card payments at all.
At this point, one of two things is going to happen. The first and most likely option is that the customer will abandon the shopping cart and you will lose the sale; the other possibility is that the customer will agree to your terms and send a check or money order to pay for the purchase.

Your customer gets to the checkout page and discovers that you use an online payment processor.
While you are the one selling the goods or services, you’re going to find that there are a number of obstacles that can come up. One of the primary things that will get in your way is the fact that more often than not, in order to process the transaction, your customers are taken to a site that’s connected to your page rather than a payment page that is a part of your site; in some cases, this will leave people questioning your business and its legitimacy.

Your customer arrives on the checkout page and, because you have a merchant account, the transaction is processed on your site.
Simply put, in this scenario, you are going to find that your business is viewed as more credible - and that’s likely to help bring in more business.

In other words, when you run an online business, whether you sell products or services, you will quickly discover that having a merchant account and doing your own credit card processing will be to your advantage. A merchant account and credit card processing improve the credibility of your online business.