Shopping Carts are all about selling online, so how you will get paid is an important part of setting up an online business. If you’re an Australian business, then there are a number of obvious choices – the “big” providers – and a number of others too. All of them do the same basic job – process the credit card transactions you put to them, take the money from the purchaser and pay it to your merchant bank account. In the case of third party payment systems like Paymate and Paypal, they make that payment into their own account balance system that you then have to manually transfer to a bank account (subject to their fees and possibly bank fees too).
When you’re deciding what cart to use, think about what payment method you want to use as part of that decision. Here are some considerations:
- Do you want a bank solution or third party solution? A third-party solution like Paypal is often cheaper but it may have restrictions such as issues processing certain types of cards or payments, or order management issues due to the way the payment provider physically presents the payment to the customer and how it tells the shopping cart software that the payment has been made. Look for an experience that is as integraetd as possible with your site.
- What fees will you pay? Payment providers generally take a cut of your transactions and may also charge you a monthly fee. Know what you will pay before you start and whether there are any minimum charges or minimum transactions that you need to meeet.
- Does the cart provider also take a cut of the transaction? Is the cart provider affiliated with any of the payment providers (e.g. owned by them) that could influence their ability to be impartial when recommending providers? If not, you may be able to ask the cart provider for guidance.
- How long does it take to get paid? How do they process transactions on weekdays and public holidays?
- What can you do if you are having trouble? Do they have a help desk and how do they operate it?
- Does the shopping cart support Australian providers that are not the standard ones. e.g. does it support Sunscorp’s payment system, or St George’s Hosted Payment Pages? Does it support Payway?
- What type of security does the cart provider use? What type of security does the payment gateway use? Do they meet Visa and MasterCard’s PCI DSS security stanards (which are mandatory), so that your business can meet them too?
There are a lot of questions to ask, but its worth it as a business without money isn’t going to get very far when you start trading!
