Keep Transaction Completely on my Site?

Once you decide whether you need a shopping cart or payment button  you will need to make a decision regarding the actual checkout process.

Let's take amore expanded view into the differences between keeping the entire shopping process on your site versus allowing some or all of the shopping process to be completed at your merchant's portal (information about Merchant Accounts and portals here). In order to accept credit cards one must first have a merchant account.

*Most merchant accounts have a payment interface that will allow you to direct your customers to, whether by directly accessing on the merchant account's site or placing a link to it from your site. Because the information is all received and stored on the Merchant's site there is no need for your site to gather any information from the user. This is the simplest level of interaction and is referred to as the Simple Method. The down side to that method is that because it does not gather customer information on your site you won't have the opportunity to expand your customer relationships by adding your customers to your newsletters and such.

In order to build a good customer base you will need to gather some of the information on your site and simultaneously store that information on your site and send over that information to your Merchant's site. This known as the Simple Integration Method (SIM). That information usually includes at least Name, Email, and Total Price. Once the transaction was processed the receipt from the transaction would come from your Merchant account giving the customer the details of their purchase. The only problem with that method is that during the final step of the transaction the customer leaves your site and is directed to your Merchant account's site.

In order to keep the entire transaction on your site you would need to need to have a security certificate and at least make the shopping pages connect via https. You would need to have a method of gathering all of the sensitive cardholder information, transferring that cardholder information while simultaneously encrypting and storing (or removing) that information; have a method to allow the merchant account interface to be able to communicate back to your site as to whether the transaction is approved and if so sending receipts and if not then determining what thte next action will be. This is known as the Advanced Integration Method (AIM). Although this sounds very complex, if keeping the entire transaction on your site is important for you we can help to make this process easy for you as well as your site vistors.

*The merchant account may charge you extra for this convenience.