The Ecommerce Guide

Many of those who surf the Internet will have come across the term, ‘ecommerce gateway’. Have you stopped to find out what it means? Most of you probably have not because you were busy doing something else over the net during that time and did not want to stop your work.  Ecommerce gateway is actually the “gateway” from your site to the merchant account. This is the “gate” through which processing of your payments is done, whether it is by credit card or any other form of payment. Ecommerce gateway is better known as the payment gateway, because it is closely related to payment.

Features and Factors

The ecommerce gateway will basically cover sale facilitating features like shopping carts, merchant accounts, web hosting and so on. Other less known services are also offered which depend upon the type of ecommerce the site:

1. Virtual terminal – this is the place where a customer can place an order after using the ‘help’ or ‘contact us’ button to enquire about your product. Many people dislike the fact that they need to go back to the home page and again navigate to the item they are interested to buy. They would rather just place the order after their questions and/or concerns have been clarified.
2. Fraud alert – this is something that most payment gateways have build within, just like a bank has an inbuilt alarm. Sometime this alarm gives false alarms, but most of the time it is accurate. By using a good fraud prevention system you save yourself and others from a lot of problems. Many will include special features such as AVS or address verification system where the details given by a customer at registration time is checked for accuracy, matching the name mentioned on the credit card with that who received the goods, as well as the three digit number that the credit cards have on their backside for additional safety, etc.
3. Recurring billing – this is something most gateway do for regular customers. By this process, you will need to key in your payment information only once on the site. After that everytime you make another purchase, the site will recover your information and before checking it out with the customer for any change, it is processed. This saves the customer time and effort.
4. Other types of payment – some gateways provide processing of e-checks though this method is really not very popular as it is slow and difficult to process.

Tags: Ecommerce, Ecommerce Gateway