A website is called eCommerce whenever you accept payments on your website. Payments could be for your customers to pay for products they buy on your website. It could be for services rendered or pre-payments for rental equipment. It could also be for a membership of some sort. And finally accepting payments could be for donations which is often the case for non-profit organizations.

There are 3 ways to accept payments. They all have their pros and cos and the one you choose should be based on what your specific business needs are.

Your options for taking payments online are as follow:

 
=1= A full integration is the best and most comprehensive option but also the most expensive and complicated one to code. Most people who call themselves web designers would not be able to code such payment system since it requires a higher end programmer like a PHP or ASP programmer.

You need a website, a merchant account (a big player is First Data) and a gateway system (big names are Authorize.net and eProcessing Network). In simple words, the gateway is the bridge technology that links your shopping cart to your bank account. At BWC, we recommend First Data for your Merchant Account and Authorize.net for the gateway.

=2= A semi integration works well for many smaller size carts. PayPal provides easy to “build” payment buttons that one can add to a product or a service. PayPal usually costs a little more per transaction (aka processing fee) than a standard Merchant Account but again it is simple to use. It used to be looked down to by many but it is now an acceptable form of payment. Note that PayPal also offers a full integration via what we call in our industry an API. This would also require a programmer like in option #1.

=3= Using a 3rd party company to handle the entire payment system is a great option for collecting donations. We have heard great things from our non-profit customers about FrontStream They can handle different donation plans, recurring payments (for instance someone wants to donate $20 per month to your organization) and their program is easy to customize.

As you can you see, you have options and your decision should be based on the following:

If you are still unclear about which option is best suited for your business or organizations, contact us by email to set up a free consultation. For additional information, click PLAY below and watch our 15-minute video on explaining the different ways to collect payments on your website.