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. 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.

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 integrates with these payment gateways:

Authorize.Net	Cardservice International/LinkPoint
Optimal Payments	Wells Fargo SecureSource
Paymentech Orbital	NPC VirtualPAY
VeriSign PayFlow Pro	Lynk Systems

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

If you plan to use Authorize.Net or VeriSign, we recommend that you obtain your merchant account through Humboldt Merchant Services. Humboldt has a program in place just for ShopSite merchants. You can read about the details of this program and apply for a merchant accout at the bottom of the page.

If you plan to use any of the other gateways, 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.

How Do I Get An Account Quickly?

How Do I Get An International Account?

If you need to process payments from customers in a variety of countries, or primarily outside of the United States and Canada, apply for a Optimal Payments account. Optimal Payments lets you accept payments from dozens of countries.

ShopSite Help and Resource Center
August 23, 2004
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