What are Payment Gateways

Businesses big and small are being urged to jump onto the Internet bandwagon for unlimited customers ready to shell out for products and services online. But when it comes to actually processing orders, there’s a lot of complexity involved.

The first problem in this context, is likely to be with the shopping cart. A customer may desire to use American Express to make a purchase while your merchant account handles only Visa. This is the reason you should mention the cards accepted. Then your shopping cart software may not be compatible with your payment processor.

For fast money transactions, nothing beats having your own credit card processing software. However the costs, monthly charges and other fees can be impractical for the smaller businesses.

Take heart because hope comes with payment gateways. These are super speed online services with huge redundancy and reliability measures plus backup in one of the most advanced data centers of today. A seamless process, it doesn’t even require your customer to interact directly with the gateway as data is forwarded through your shopping cart and a secure SSL connection.

Electronic fund transfer point of sale terminal or EFTPOS, is an online process of checking validity, encryption of transaction details, ensuring delivery to correct address and decryption of responses that is routed back to the shopping cart. Newcomers prefer to use a payment gateway for processing credit cards. The step-by-step instructions guide you in making your website credit card enabled. Essentially, a third party takes care of the entire credit card processing for you.