The biggest advantage of internet technology is providing the ability to process transactions online. The biggest boon of the internet technology to the prevailing business environment is its ability to perform e-commerce. Every website design now a days is made with the added functionality of e-commerce. E-commerce business strives mainly because of its ability to process transactions online, mainly through credit card. Any website design company can include the payment gateway to the website by pasting some codes onto the website design.

This article gives some information about the payment gateway services:

There are basically two ways through which the payment gateway system works-

1. Merchant Accounts:

For an established business offline, one might be already accepting credit card transaction and have merchant account in some bank and have some kind of electronic terminal in your shop/workplace for swiping credit cards through. For those who already have a merchant account, one still needs to apply for a new, separate Internet merchant account. For those who are not having a merchant account, the system works similar like - you apply for a merchant account from a bank (doesn't have to be the bank you currently bank with, but that is of course helpful) who supply you with a merchant account. This is just an ID or account number, but without it you can't take credit cards. Apart from this you will require a credit card processor(generally the banks provide this) who will then look after your transaction details. They usually charge some fee as the setup fee and then some monthly minimum charges and some percentage of each transaction. These all depends on the bank with whom you are dealing with.

2. This is the best option for a startup company doing business online. They essentially allow the users to use their merchant account for a fee(which varies) and in most of the cases it helps to setup within hours and taking credit card informations right away. Commonly used Payment Processors is "Paypal" and it is build for the business that are carried out at Ebay.

Note: Easy and fast to setup, fee's vary but are very competitive, good support and most shopping cart software is catered for. On the minus side you have far less control over pricing, discount etc than you would with a merchant account.

Following are some of the informations regarding the Payment Processors:

Paypal:

It is the simplest and the fastest Payment Processors available in the market. This includes "button maker" so you really don't need to know or learn any of the complicated in and outs of how to use it.

2checkout:

This is also an effective payment processor but expensive rates, dreadful support, slow fraud checking (usually days) and the fact they honestly couldn't care less about their vendors is enough to put anyone off. They recently upgraded themselves(from version1 to version

WorldPay
This is part of Royal Bank of Scotland and ideally made for UK businesses. This is widely used payment processor and money shed at the start can be quickly recovered.