While setting up payment processing on your online business may seem like a hassle, you’ll be glad you did.
After all, if this is one of the things that makes your customers happy, you’ll have lots of takers for your services and product. So here are a few steps to follow to organize payment processing.
Steps to Set Up eCommerce Payment Processing
Follow these steps when setting up payment processing.
Step 1: Choose a payment processor
The first step to setting up your online business is choosing a payment processor. You can use PayPal or another service that allows you to accept credit card payments online.
Step 2: Set up your merchant account
In order to accept payments from customers, you need an account at the payment processing company. This is called your merchant account. This account allows businesses to accept payments from customers over the Internet, but at no cost to the business owner.
Once you have signed up for an account, you will need to provide certain information about yourself and your business so that they can verify your identity and determine if they want to approve your application for their service.
Step 3: Create an invoice
In order to receive payments from customers, you must create an invoice for each sale or purchase. You can use any software or service that will help you create invoices for your business. The software should allow you to set up recurring subscriptions and subscriptions with automatic renewals.
Payment Processing: What are Your Options
There are three main ways to set up payment processing:
1. SDKs
Software Development Kits (SDKs) allow you to build applications that work with various payment gateways, including PayPal and Authorize.net.
An SDK will allow you to add payment processing capabilities to your website without having to code yourself or hire someone else to code for you.
2. Account + API
This approach is similar to the first one, but rather than building an application from scratch, it relies on two separate parts: an account provider (usually a bank or credit card company like Visa or MasterCard) and an API provider (usually a software company like Stripe).
The account provider handles all of the technical aspects of accepting payments; the API provider handles all of the actual technology that allows you to accept payments through their system (including routing them through Stripe).
3. Merchant Account + API
This is the same as above except that instead of relying on an account provider and API provider separately, they’re combined into one package so that all of your payment processing needs are covered by one provider.
SummaryWant to start accepting customer payments? Here’s everything to learn about setting up payment processing.