Shopping Carts Software
Today, there are thousands of pre-built shopping carts software solutions out there including many free ones such as Magento, OSCommerce and Zen Cart. Then why do you even need to pay us to build you an e-commerce site using DTW Commerce? Well, ask yourself if you are a professional designer, can you design as good as the pros? And that is not to be only in your own opinion but in the opnion of independent Internet savvy people? If the answer is no, you need us to design your Storefront. Now, are you familiar with PHP or ASP.NET technologies? Are you a trained/certified software installer/developer? If you are not you need us to install and customize your webstore or if you know the technologies but you are not very good with it, you still need us to professional help it requires.
A basic definition of shopping cart would be a series of scripts that keep track of items a visitor picks to buy from your site until they proceed to the "checkout".
A popular misconception is that shopping carts handle the whole financial transaction, but they only really act as a front-end which passes information via a secure connection (another service) to a payment gateway which is a separate service altogether.
Merchant accounts, payment gateways, shopping carts - credit card processing can get pretty confusing when you start looking into the various aspects of ecommerce. We will try to help you understand few important aspects of shopping carts.
What Is A Merchant Account?
A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments by debit or credit cards. So a merchant account is an agreement between a retailer, a merchant bank and payment processor for the settlement of credit card and/or debit card transactions. Contact your banking Institution to apply for a merchant account.
An Internet merchant account is a merchant account specifically designed to handle online payment processing of credit cards. If you already have a merchant account, you'll probably notice that another difference between the two is the fees; typically, the Internet merchant account fees are higher because of the assumed higher risks of online payment as opposed to a face-to-face credit card or debit card transaction.
Merchant account fees are usually broken down into three categories: a discount rate, transaction fees, and monthly fees, and fees can vary widely. You can also use a 3rd party payment processor such as Paypal, 2checout.com etc. if you want to avoid getting your own mechant account at the beginning or do not qualify for one. Contact your banking Institution to apply for a merchant account.
A payment gateway is a service that acts as an intermediary between the shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers' credit card issuer and your merchant account. Think of it as a EFTPOS terminal in cyberspace. It reviews validity, encrypts transaction details, ensures they are sent to the correct destination and then decrypts the responses which are sent back to the shopping cart.
This is a seamless process and your customer does not directly interact with the payment gateway; as data is forwarded to the gateway via your shopping cart and a secure (SSL) connection. The shopping cart is usually configured via plugins to send information in a format that is acceptable to the particular payment gateway.
For Canadian businesses Beanstream and Moneris' eSelectPlus would be two viable gateway systems.
Shopping Cart Scalability
You may only want limited shopping cart features initially, but what about in the future? Give yourself room to grow as having to change software mid-stream to a totally different package can be a real time-consuming.
The shopping carts we set you up with allows for great scalability. While you may not require bells and buzzers now, as your business grows you may find that your needs change. The better shopping carts are in a modular format which allow for scalability with minimum downtime. If you do not appreciate that now, you may lose money and time on the long run.
