Building An E-commerce Website & Its Features

E-Commerce has hit the Internet like a hurricane, thousands of new online businesses are opening around the world each year and these businesses are seeing their profits skyrocket! The businesses that are largely succeeding and profiting on the Internet are the ones that provide unlimited payment options for their customers.

However, many businesses, especially international ones are not experiencing this opportunity for growth because they cannot obtain reliable Merchant Account Service. Obtaining a Merchant Account for your business, along with a highly designed, user-friendly eCommerce web site can mean independence from your local market competitors.
To reach out to the global market, to increase your business exposure and gain new customers, it is important to utilize professional eCommerce Packages. With unique, professional and cost-effective eCommerce Solutions and Online Payment Solutions, your success is virtually ensured.

E-commerce solution includes:

Home Page Design with associated logos, images, buttons, etc
Product Database
Intuitive Shopping Cart design
Complete Online Payment System Integration with design for Cart Interface
Order Tracking
Search / Advanced Search
Configuration of tax rates, shipping rates, etc
Compelling web site design
Search engine compatibility

Some Additional Features that you can choose:

Complete configuration, design and setup of shopping cart capabilities
On-line order forms (shopping cart and informational form, if desired)
Search engine for within your site only
Downloadable Product Catalog with links
Personalized link buttons (graphic or animated); unlimited links; links page (if desired)
Complete search engine optimization, including meta tags and site descriptions
Submission to top search engines, directories, etc

Details on few features: E-commerce

The most advanced features available in the market.

A fully secured solution.
UPS integration.
Unlimited product categories and subcategories.
Advanced product search parameters.
Detailed product pages.
Shopping cart facility
New launch product listing
Product ratings
Banner facility
Facility to manage shipping services
An advanced mailing system.
SEO optimized (Google Analytics, Physical Pages, User Defined Meta Tags)
Site is compatible with all major browsers.

Advanced, Customizable Ecommerce Search
Shoppers can conduct simple text or product category searches or perform advanced searches by keyword, manufacturer, vendor, price range, and/or sale items. Please see
Real-Time Shipping Rates from Leading Carriers
Accurately manage shipping charges with integrated support for real-time shipping costs directly from UPS, FedEx and USPS rate servers, if required.

Enhanced Ecommerce Promotional Mail Utility
Send targeted promotional e-mail to customers by date range or product purchases. Visitors can manage their subscription preferences online.
Sales & Other Reports
Monitor sales activity using sales reporting tools. Generate sales summary, sales detail and product sales reports and graphs, if required. Other reports too can be generated as per client requirements.
The Basics - How Funds are Collected

Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the site owner's perspective, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank. In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway. This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds. The payment gateway will then report back a successful transaction to the merchant, at which point the merchant's shopping cart system will respond by displaying a "Thank You" message to the buyer. Funds will sit until the transaction is settled, which means the funds are collected and deposited to your bank account. Until a transaction is settled, the transaction will not post to your bank account and the corresponding debit will not post to the buyer's credit card account.

Merchant Accounts

A merchant account is a special type of account specifically for online retailers. They are designed to allow non-POS (point of sale) transactions using credit cards, or transactions where you don't have the person's credit card in hand. In other words, you don't have a card swiper. A merchant account is not the same as a bank account. It acts as a go-between between your payment gateway and your bank account, accepting funds from credit cards which are then deposited into your bank.

A merchant account is a relationship based on trust between you and the issuing bank. The bank takes funds from the buyer's account and deposits into your account. A payment processor takes care of checking for availability of funds and debiting from the credit card account. The bank issuing the merchant account is trusting that you will fulfill your end of the transaction by providing the product or service that the buyer purchased. In case where this does not occur, the buyer can dispute the transaction. This puts the issuing bank on the line because they are then obligated to return the funds to the buyer's card (a chargeback). Therefore, merchant providers are taking a risk in allowing a merchant to take credit cards under their name.

The organization providing your merchant account will do underwriting on the account when you apply to check your credit. If you have a history of too many chargeback, you may be denied. In fact, too many chargeback can result in you, as a merchant, being put on the Terminated Merchant File (also called The Match File). This is a blacklist which will effectively prevent you from ever receiving a merchant account again.

Payment Gateways

A payment gateway serves as the front end to your merchant account, allowing you to manage funds, transactions, and the like. It also serves as a connection between your website and your merchant account. It takes data submitted via your secure order forms and presents it to your processing bank. The processing bank then approves or declines the transaction and sends its response back to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then turns around and provides this data back to the merchant for appropriate handling of the transaction. A payment gateway, then, does not offer services such as merchant accounts or shopping carts, although some of the larger-known gateways do provide such options as value-added services.

Some of the better known payment gateway services are Authorize.Net, Verisign, 2CheckOut.com, Linkpoint, Paysystems.com, Worldpay.com, and Merchant Commerce. Some of the things to look for in a payment gateway are compliance with CISP, SDP and DISC (security initiatives put out by the major credit card companies), virtual terminal (to be able to accept transactions over the phone by typing in their data rather than only relying on your website), fraud prevention, recurring billing, methods of integration, cost and whether they can accept e-checks or not.

Fraud prevention is a big one because, as stated above, too many fraudulent transactions will result in chargeback which could end up putting you on the Match List and your merchant account closed. Some of the common fraud detection mechanisms are Address Verification (AVS) which compares the customer's address with that on file with the issuing bank, CVV2 which makes use of the 3-digit security code on the credit card (4-digit on American Express cards).

Most gateways will provide instructions on how to interface with their servers from your web store. Most gateways offer two methods of integration.

Many gateway providers can get you set up with a merchant account at the same time as the gateway. So, in most cases, you do not need to sign up for them separately.