Accepting Payment Cards

What Are My Choices?

Credit cards are the most popular method of paying for purchases over the Internet, and you will lose many potential customers if your store does not accept credit cards. There are two options for processing credit cards in ShopSite:

You can enable automatic, real-time online processing through any of the payment gateways listed below. When a customer places an order, ShopSite contacts the payment gateway and obtains credit card authorization during the order process.

Merchants that don’t want to offer real-time payment processing can use manual processing. For manual processing, the merchant obtains the credit card information from ShopSite sometime after an order has been placed and then authorizes the transactions through an Internet virtual terminal or over the phone. This method still requires you to have merchant accounts (see below) If you don’t have the necessary accounts to do this, you can apply for an NPC Virtual Terminal account through their VirtualPAY service.

How do I Get Started?

Whether you are going to process credit cards manually or automatically in ShopSite, you will need a merchant (commercial) bank account. This is the account that enables a business to authorize and settle credit card transactions (the moving of money from the buyer's account to the merchant's account). If you have an existing brick-and-mortar store, you probably already have such an account, but it may not be viable for "card not present" processing. You can apply for a merchant account for online sales with Humboldt Merchant Services.

If you are going to offer real-time credit card processing, you must have a merchant account and an account with a transaction processing company (sometimes called a "payment gateway"). ShopSite Starter integrates with these payment gateways:

Just to make life exciting, not all payment gateways can work with all merchant bank accounts.

If you plan to use Authorize.Net, we recommend that you obtain your merchant account through Total Merchant Services (TMS). TMS is an Authorize.Net reseller and has a program in place just for ShopSite merchants. You can read about the details of this program, or go directly to the application page.

If you plan to use VeriSign, you can obtain a compatible merchant bank account through NPC.

If you plan to use VirtualPAY or E-Commerce Exchange, they will provide you with both a merchant account and transaction processing.

After you have signed up with a transaction processing company and have received your login information, go to the Payment Setup screen in ShopSite and select and configure that processor.

Note:

Not all payment gateways are available on all servers that host ShopSite. See the Payment Processor Matrix for a list of payment processors available on each server operating system.

ShopSite Help and Resource Center
April 18, 2002
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