Making the e-commerce hosting decision

One of the most common questions we are asked by first time contacts is “Do you provide e-commerce hosting?” Since we are one of the first e-commerce development and hosting companies in Virginia, the obvious answer is “Yes. Of course.” The less obvious answer is “It depends on what you mean by e-commerce hosting.”

Providing e-commerce hosting is nothing more than having a web server optimized and configured for taking payments over the Internet. The problem is that there are dozens of processes for taking payments over the web and each of those processes requires the web server to be configured to use those processes.

To make things a little easier let’s break the process of accepting online payments down into the individual processes.

The e-commerce site: The first step in taking an online payment is controlled by the e-commerce solution you are using. It must be designed to gather all the necessary customer and credit card information necessary to process the transaction. This generally consists of:

• A set of pages that displays the products and allows the user to “buy” them.
• A shopping cart that will maintain a list of multiple products while the customer continues shopping.
• A shipping process to determine if shipping will be charged and how much that shipping will be.
• A sales tax process to determine if sales tax must be paid.
• A billing/shipping information process that allows the customer to enter their (at the very least) a billing and shipping address.
• A payment review page that shows the customer exactly what they are buying, how much shipping and sales tax will be and an order total.
• A billing / credit card information page.

Only after all of this information is gathered and processed by your catalog software do we get to the “payment processing”.

The Payment Gateway: A payment gateway is simply an interface between the information gathered in your e-commerce web site and the credit card processing company. It takes the information gathered in your site and presents it to the card processing site and waits for an answer. After the answer is received your catalog software must process the answer and display the appropriate response. If the payment was accepted by the card processing company a receipt page is shown. If it was refused the refusal or error is shown and the customer must be given the appropriate choices.

The credit card processing company: No, this is not (necessarily) your merchant account company. These companies interface between the information provided by the gateway and the credit card companies.

The merchant account: This is a banking account that can accept credit card transactions and transfer the payment or credit to your checking account.

You may be getting the idea that processing payments over the Internet can be complicated. After all, there are dozens of payment gateways, dozens of card processing companies, and thousands of merchant account companies. 

In fact, the process can be complicated but it doesn’t have to be. We have partnered with a few of the best to insure that the processing of online orders through your LetMeShop catalog goes without a hitch. So, before you make the decision on which catalog software to use, which merchant account to sign up with or which payment gateway to use, call us first. We can help take the confusion out of the process and probably save you a little money (and maybe a lot of headache).