In order to process credit cards through your online store, you will need a Merchant Account and a Payment Gateway.
Merchant Account
A merchant account is simply a commercial bank account that allows you to accept credit card payments. There is a transaction fee, which is a percentage of each purchase. The percentage is based on volume. Higher volume accounts have a lower transaction fee percentage. There is typically a minimum monthly fee, sometimes called a statement fee, of around $20. This would come from a 3rd party such as your current bank or one of our recommended partners.
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway allows your online store to connect to your merchant bank account. It acts as a virtual terminal, as apposed to a card-swipe terminal. There is typically a small transaction fee and a monthly fee for this service. Merchant account providers typically resell this service from a 3rd party, or you can use one of our recommended partners.
Example Transaction Scenario
- A customer places an order on your store.
- AmeriCommerce contacts your payment gateway over an encrypted SSL connection, providing your account information and the customer information.
- The payment gateway sends this information to your merchant account bank.
- Your merchant bank contacts the credit card issuer bank for your customer and gets authorization for the amount of the order, while verifying address and other information.
- Your merchant bank returns a response to the payment gateway, which returns a response to AmeriCommerce, which will either mark the orders payment as approved or declined.
- At the end of each day, the payment gateway processes all payments automatically to deposit the funds into your merchant account.
Our Recommended Partners
Merchant Account
If you do not have a merchant account, AmeriCommerce recommends Paymentech. They also offer heavily discounted rates for the Authorize.Net payment gateway if you use their merchant account.
http://www.paymentech.com
Payment Gateway
AmeriCommerce is compatible with over 50 payment gateways, though we recommend Authorize.Net as the best and most widely-used payment gateway. Authorize.Net also offers merchant accounts now as well.
http://www.authorize.net