• E-Commerce Overview
• Choosing A Solution
• Online Transactions
• Compare PSP Tool
• Our Solutions

E-Commerce Overview

Taking payment online can benefit your business by extending your customer base; boosting cash flow; reducing costs; enhancing customer service and improving your competitive advantage.

Why is Online Trading so Important?

• Internet shopping in Britain soared to £2.5 billion over Christmas 2003, a rise of nearly 70% on 2002 : Source: Sunday Times (18/1/2004)
• 54% of UK businesses now place orders online : Source: The DTI international benchmarking study, 2003

Electronic business is real and continues to grow as a medium with over 44% of UK adults having used the Internet to order tickets, goods or services (Office of National Statistics, 2002). This website gives you impartial and informed information to make the right choices for your business and help push your revenues.

Doing business over the Internet can be daunting, but if you enable customers to pay for products online, you can generate actual revenues and make a return on the time and money you have spent developing your website.

If you have no online payment mechanism, the customers manually contacts the merchant by phone or mail and refers to the online catalogue to place the order. Although less expensive, this method lacks efficiency and increases labour costs, especially if customers want to order multiple products.

The expectations of online shoppers have grown in past years and a flawed system may deter customers from putting their trust in your product. They may feel the system lacks security and may be reluctant to proceed with their purchase.

A phone number for the customer to call is better than nothing, but are you missing sales by failing to offer an electronic payment system to your customers?

How the Online order process works:

• The customer is not present.
• Customer fills online shopping cart with products and proceeds to a virtual checkout.
• A PSP collects the card details and the total transaction value - you can compare PSP's using our free online payments comparison tool.
• An acquiring bank then authorises the transaction.
• The card limit is temporarily reduced by the value of the transaction.
• Goods are dispatched and the transaction value is then captured from card.
• Small transaction costs are also charged by the PSP and acquiring bank.

When taking online Payments you need a payment solution to collect card details over the Internet. A Payment Service Provider acts like a virtual PDQ machine. There are various ways in which we can configure your online store. Information on the payment solutions and how to make a choice, can be found here. Check out our 200 tips to marketing here.

Online store

Selling your products or taking booking for your service online could be the best business decision you ever made