An ecommerce shopping cart is typically used by the customer to enter his online order. The shopping cart allows customers to select the items they want to purchase from your website. At checkout the shopping cart totals the items, adds any applicaable tax and shipping charges, and collects the customers shipping and billing information. The shopping cart then transmits the details of the transaction to the payment gateway.

The payment gateway captures the credit card transaction, encrypts the transaction information, routes it to the credit card processor and then returns either an approval or a decline notification back to the shopping cart. If approved, the cart will complete the customer's order. If declined, the cart will prompt the user to re-attempt or to enter an alternate payment method.

This is a very quick and seamless process and the customer does not directly interact with the payment gateway in any way since the data is forwarded to the gateway via your shopping cart over a secure (SSL) connection.

There are three vital activities performed by an online payment gateway when a customer attempts to make a purchase from your website using a credit card or a debit check card. These include the credit card authorization, credit card settlement, and activity reporting.

• Authorization - Any purchase made with a credit or debit card via a payment gateway must first be authorized by the credit card issuer. The payment gateway checks that the credit card is acceptable. The gateway affords you a secure link between you, your customer and your credit card processor. It also allows for fast and efficient transaction processing with an average response time of 2 seconds.

• Settling - At the end of the day, the internet payment gateway groups all of your transactions together and sends them off to your bank in a single batch. This process passes the transaction to your bank so that you receive payment. This process is called settling. Once the funds settle, it normally takes two business days for you to see the funds electronically deposited into your bank account.

• Reporting - This process records your transactions and allows you to view them using the payment gateway report facilities. From here you can review them, print them or download them to your computer for further processing. Some payment gateways are even compatible with Quickbooks, making accounting and reconciling a breeze.

UNLIMITED USERS

An Internet payment gateway allows an unlimited number of users to access the gateway concurrently, which is different than a credit card processing terminal or software solution where only a sinlge customer can checkout at a time, or a sinlge operator can enter transactions one-at-a-time. Internet payment gateway gateways afford multiple users the ability to enter transactions from numerous locations, all at the same time. Effectively, an Internet payment gateway gives you an unlimited user license fee.

FRAUD SCREENING TOOLS

Internet payment gateways also provide fraud screening tools to detect and minimize fraudulent credit card transactions. This includes address verification and card code value (CVV) verification to ensure that the payments made via your Internet payment gateway are, indeed, legitimate orders and not fraudulent. It also prevents fraud by storing the credit card transactions in the Internet payment gateway rather than on your website. This reduces your liability since you don't store any credit card information on your server.

OTHER BENEFITS

Payment gateways also provide use of a virtual terminal, where a merchant can manually enter credit card transactions that are received via methods other than a website. This is extremely useful for entering in orders you may take over the phone or through the mail.

Also, many Internet payment gateways offer a secure (SSL) checkout page so the merchant doesn't need to outlay the costs of their own secure certificate.

A good Internet payment gateway also provides 24x7 customer support so you can get assistance from with someone with experience when needed.

MISCELLANEOUS

When looking to find an Internet payment gateway, there are some other important considerations. These include uptime of about 99.9 percent and a support team that can get the servers back online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Anything less is unacceptable, especially for a web-based business.

Ease of use is another critical factor. The payment gateway should be easy to integrate with your site through the help of technical support and your webmaster.

Scalability is another important concern. If a Gateway provider can't grow with your business, you can run into future problems. Because of this, it's important to verify that your gateway provider's server can handle significant growth.

Finally, you should ensure that the gateway provider you choose offers all the features you need, which may include options such as Quickbooks integration, recurring billing, transaction upload and download, and more.

APPLY FOR A GATEWAY ACCOUNT NOW - GUARANTEED APPROVAL!