Ready to start ecommerce site, Payments help?

Nick69

Hi all,

I'm now ready to make my first online shop, I can design the site with no problems but for some reason I can't get my head around the Online payment thing.
Would anyone be able to help me out with some advice?

Do I need a Business bank account with Internet Merchant ID?
Do I need a seperate online payment gateway such as Worldpay/Sagepay etc?

If Yes to the above do I just link them together or something?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Nick

steve1980

If you have a business then you should have a business account.

As for payment merchants, there is Paypal, Worldpay (part of Streamline), Sagepay plus a few others.

Decide who you want to go with and follow the instructions provided with that provider.

InsideInsurance

Do you have to have a Merchant ID and Gateway? No, you can use services like PayPal which offer you an all in one solution without you needing to get the above.

Advantage of the likes of PayPal and Google Checkout is they are simplier and quicker to set up and generally have little/ no standing charges. The downside is their per transaction fees tend to be much higher.

You can go down the "full" setup which in time will result in lower transactional costs but can have both higher up front fees, standing charges and slower release of funds.

There has always been an argument of if using the likes of PayPal for a small/ unknown business is a benefit or a detriment from a consumer trust point of view.

energize_2

Your bank should be able to help by putting you in touch with the payment service provider they operate with ie Sagepay with Barclays, or Creditcall with Lloyds. The business I worked for did use Paypal some years ago, but we did move away from them, as contacting them for any queries was very difficult. Hope all goes well for you.

grantd

First you need a Sagepay account and then you need a merchant account, so maybe Streamline. So contact Sagepay and Streamline and they'll tell you what to do.

buglawton

Getting a Sagepay acct is nigh impossible if you are a zero track record, low turnover operation.
I tried once on a business that had been running 6 years and turning over about 6k/annum via Paypal - Sagepay (and their partner bank) utterly inefficient and disinterested in small players without admitting that fact (would save time if they did simply admit they prefer larger businesses with some bricks & mortar attached).

Stick with Paypal & Google Checkout. All ecommerce web packages tend to have both gateways, all you do is set up a few thingies.

kit

I am also setting up a retail web site. I plan to use paypal.

Can someone tell me if paypal offer a way to build paypal in to my website? And if so is it free?
Also, if someone pays by paypal, is there a way for it to take that item off my website so others can't buy it?

InsideInsurance

PayPal basically offer 2 services:

1) Offsite - you pass the information and the customer to PayPal and the payment details and transaction are conducted on PayPals site

2) Onsite - you collect all the payment information on your site and behind the scenes pass the details to PayPal for processing but the customer stays on your site

Option 1 is purely a transactional level fee

Option 2 has both standing charges and transactional fees plus as you are collecting credit card details on your server you will be required to have enhanced security with your webhost.

With both options the PayPal site will make a call back to your site to let you know if the transaction was successful or not. So to answer your last question then yes it is possible to do stock control using it. Exactly how you want to do it will vary by how much you're willing to risk 2 people buying the last item etc. The most cautious approach is to reduce the stock as soon as someone adds it to their basket and then release it only after X minutes/ hours unless they click through to PayPal in which case you hold it until Y minutes/ hours and then release it back unless you get the call back from PayPal saying payment successful in which case you obviously dont release the stock back.

PayPals callbacks normally come with in a minute, they say it normally comes back within the 30 minutes but it can sometimes be hours.

I am sure there are off the shelf solutions that will do this for you - as I say, it is basically stock/ inventory control - but I have built this sort of thing for people in the past.

buglawton

Option 1 reassures the customer more because they can see they've been transferred onto Paypal's site.

It reassures me as I nowadays don't like to put card details into any other than a handful of big company sites. With smaller sites I seek out Paypal or Google Checkout, otherwise do the transaction over the phone.

Option 2 is sometimes used because it can look more 'professional'.

patman99

There are free versions of sites like 'Avactis' that give you Paypal built-in. There are also completely free e-commerce solutions that run in Drupal, for which there is a Paypal plug-in.
I believe Zencart, OSCommerce and the like also have Paypal built-in.

I have had to build a website for a local clothes shop (I'm no web designer, but hey, I'll give anything a go). I had the job of registering the domain name and setting-up the hosting. The host actually had several e-commerce solutions as direct package installs. So no need to actually do any coding at all.

VSC

I have always used Paypal, Google Checkout and offer buyers the opportunity to print out an order from to pay by cheque/postal order.

Along with that I always mention that by using Paypal and GC I never get to see their cc/dc details, just the order details, which is a reassurance to the customer.