What is ecommerce.Electronic commerce, simply reffered to as eCommerce,e-commerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.
The phrase may possibly refer to other buying and selling of products online. The entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services can be termed ecommerce.
The sheer volume of trade that is conducted electronically has grown exponentially with the widespread use of the Internet.
A big majority of people new to websites and/or ecommerce are baffled at the ins and outs of ecommerce. Furthermore, people who seem to be fairly adept at scripting can set up a store using some popular package such as OSCommerce and then are left stumped by the idea of making it work with a payment gateway to essentially collecting money and have it deposited into their account.
I will give a brief overview of how the system is set up to collect your money. I will then discuss in brief what to look for in evaluating payment gateways.
The Basics - How Funds are Collected
Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the perspective of the site owner, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank.
In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway.
This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds.
No comments:
Post a Comment