Simplifying payment procedure for your online customer

For all those who are ambitious about running a business over the internet, the ability to accept credit cards is a must. Online businesses which are unable to accept online credit card payments tend to lose more than 60 percent of their business due to this single factor. Looking closely at the online customers behavior you will find that they are impulsive and cannot wait for long procedures or long time. They are too reluctant to move aside from the net, in order to make phone calls or fill out order forms and post them over, to place their orders. What they are looking for is speed and comfort of placing an order. If you look at some of the bigger e-commerce web sites you will find that more than 80 percent of the orders are received with online credit card payments. However, other methods of placing order should also be well considered to avoid loosing the remaining 20 percent customers.

Accepting Credit cards in your online business will increase the credibility of the business in the mind of the customer and he will no longer perceive it as a low profile business. Apart from the significant income boost that credit cards can offer for your internet business, theres lot of convenience for you as it really simplifies a lot of your work. Here are some benefits:

1. All the transactions and the deposits take place electronically and so you need not visit the bank time and again.

2. As everything is done electronically you dont have to spend too much of time on making sales records, you have all the reports at the click of a button.

3. Credit cards are as trustworthy as the receiving cash, and you would not face the problem of the customers checks bouncing off.

4. It is easier to trace the orders at the time of customer service.

5. You need lesser amount of staff to carry out the entire operation as you really dont need anyone for the order processing.

6. You can generate orders 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

So by now you must be totally convinced how important accepting credit cards for your online business is. To accept credit cards online or offline the basic requirement is to have a merchant account. The ideal way to get started with a merchant account is to approach a broker who can really help you with all aspects such as the software required and technical help and above all there are less chances of the application getting turn down.

Automation is the key.

If we take a broader look at the order placement, we come across three common ways in which people place orders and each of these must be fully automated to provide maximum convenience to the customer. This will not only help the customer but will also simplify your procedures and cut down on the number of work hours required. The time that you will save by automation can be well utilized for other purposes like marketing of your business. As we emphasized the ideal practice for an online business should be the ability to accept direct online payments, as this gets the maximum orders for the business. However there are other methods of placing orders as well, so while maintaining that direct online credit card processing is the best solution, we will still pay attention to the other ways in which a business receives order.

Directly Online credit card processing.

A toll free number (the 800 series phone number) with live operators to provide services.

Post and fax.

Lets take a look at each of these in detail:

Online credit card processing:

The orders received online are accepted and processed on a secure server and that too in real time, without the customer having to wait for too long. A secure server is a server which can accept and transmit information which is confidential such as the credit card number without the risk of anyone else stealing the information during the transmission. Just for your knowledge this all is carried out with the help of encryption technology, and almost all browsers support this technology.

Software is installed on the website which will charge the credit card company for the order and then this amount is deposited directly into the merchant account held with the bank. Upon a successful transaction the business owner will receive the order and can then have it shipped over. Some Online stores like to use the facility of Fulfillment Company which will take care of the packaging and shipping of the orders, saving the business owner a lot of effort and time.

800 series number:

To extend the facility of a 24 hour phone order support system, you certainly dont need to set up your very own customer service department and get the entire required infrastructure. You can again use of fulfillment company which will receive all your orders, process them and then send over the details to you for the shipment or carry out the shipment on their own, depending on the agreement between the two of you. When you hire a fulfillment company to carry out the order processing over the phone for you can expect them to charge you anything between $5.00 and $7.00 per order.

Post or Fax: while this method is losing popularity still you should not ignore this method of order processing. There are still quite a few customers who are uncomfortable with the idea of putting in their credit card details into the online web form or disclose it over the phone and thus prefer to fill out mail orders and send them across. Also most of these people may want to make payments using checks. This aspect too can be handled by the fulfillment company if so desired.

The basic idea behind giving you all this information is to spell out the need of making the order processing and payment procedure simplified for your customer to get your business going. What is important is the ability of the business to accept credit cards. And to support this you must have an online system because most of your orders come with online payments. But then you certainly dont want to lose out on any bit of sales so the provision for other order taking methods should always be available.