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How e-Commerce works - Selling online:
When you're trying to get your business online, often the most confusing area is when you have to decide how you will receive payments from your customers.
Payment Gateways, Shopping Carts, Merchant accounts, verification, security, SSL. The list of things to consider seem to be endless. This is short article describing the most common options available to you when you start to sell your products online.
Remember, if you do not have the resources or skills needed to bring your e-Commerce dream to life, Piko Technologies are ever-ready to put your plan into action.
Fax or Mail Orders:
Perhaps the most common and certainly the easiest method. You add a list of your products or services to your website, and you receive all your orders through the mail or by fax. For many small businesses this is the most cost-effective option. This method does not have any of the draw-backs that can come from Credit Card acceptance via the Internet. However the down-side is that you are often turning away a large number of customers who are ready to pay immediately.
3rd Party Payment Gateway:
This is probably the next best method to accepting Credit Cards yourself. For smaller businesses, this is the best way to get online. You put your website online then tie it into a third-party Credit Card Gateway (like PayPal). Although some of these can sometimes look unprofessional when compared to accepting Credit Cards yourself, they do the job and are all most smaller businesses need.
Full Online Order Processing:
This is what all website owners would love to have in the ideal world. The online 24/7/365 ordering system, that requires almost no maintenance from its owner. This method includes immediate Credit Card processing, and acceptance.
It is a very convenient and timesaving way to do business. Unfortunately this method is rather expensive to setup, some smaller businesses simply cannot justify this expense. For many larger businesses this money well spent, as it saves a lot of time in man hours once setup. Its very difficult to get this method up and running, but once it is, it will run with very little intervention or modification.
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