How to process credit card payments online?

It is very popular question among newcomers of eCommerce industry. For those, who don’t know what eCommerce means, it is just the shortening for Electronic Commerce, which basically describes any shop/marketplace operating mainly using internet. So how to process credit card payments online?

There are several ways of implementing this feature in your online shop, but the most popular and easiest way would be through special payment gateway. To use this gateway, you will need a merchant account from your local bank or any third-party company who is dealing with financial questions in digital marketing. Our company is one of most experienced on the eCommerce market in Europe which provides necessary solutions for all web businesses, so if you want a third-party company to be responsible for all of the credit card transactions in your internet shop then just drop us a line.

Process of accepting credit card payments

Overall step by step process of transferring your basic online shop into powerful marketplace by addition of new payment methods is very simple:

You need to open a Merchant Account
Add a new transaction form onto your website provided by your bank or third-party company
Voila! You are ready to accept credit card payments

Newcomers tend to use third-party merchant accounts for several reasons: security, responsibility, transaction processing speed, simplicity, usability. The only thing you are losing by going to a third-party company rather than your own bank are a bit higher transaction fees, but at the same time you are given some great opportunities to work with whole Europe by accepting different currencies in one place. Most of the banks won’t give you the option to accept payments in more than three currencies (USD, GBP and EUR), meaning that your online shop wouldn’t be successful for example in Switzerland, Czech, Denmark, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary and other European countries which don’t use euros.

Be careful if you want to find a third-party merchant account on your own, because there are dozens of companies who will provide you such solution, but they might not be the best for your business. If you have a simple online shop, then you could use a PayPal special trading account, but for bigger businesses you might as well signup for high risk merchant accounts with much higher security levels against frauds. Also, some companies charge ridiculous amount of money for just setting up an account, and after that they might as well charge you around 10% transaction fee. We don’t believe that you are so generous to some third-party companies, so better drop us a line and we will find the best solution for your business.

When you got yourself a merchant account, you will need to add the payment processing gateway to your website. Depending on the merchant account there are several ways of how to process credit card payments online, either use some plugin, or ask your web developer to change the shopping cart payment code. Typically, payment form would look something like that:

credit_card_payments_online

Depending on the provider templates could be different and most of them are 100% customizable and responsive (meaning that form will work both on desktop and mobile website versions). If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments below or by contacting EU Merchant Account directly!