Accepting Credit Cards- Accepting credit cards these day is a no brainer. You must be accepting credit cards if you want to increase your sales. There are some tools you must have to accept credit cards and Web Host Ranking is going to explain those.
Web Host Ranking is going to start with the biggest reason why you should accept credit cards. It has been proven that accepting credit cards will increase your sales dramatically. Don’t believe us? Think about it. How many times have you left the house with no money and only “plastic” in your pocket and ended up making some type of purchase. Quite a few times we are sure. It has also been proven that people who make purchases with a credit cards spend more money than they would if they are paying by cash. The reason for this is 100% mental!!! People hate giving away cold hard cash from their pockets. They get emotionally attached to it. But when they use a credit card or debit card, they never have that feeling of giving money away so they are more likely to spend more money without even thinking twice about it. Accepting credit cards = more money $$$
Ok, now that we have your attention, Web Host Ranking is going to explain to you how to accept credit cards and debit cards. This doesn’t matter if you are running a retail store or an online eCommerce store. The concept is the same for both of them. Sure there are slight differences between two of them like what type of merchant account you need, but we will explain that later.
To begin with, you have to a merchant account to accept credit cards. Merchant accounts act as the middle man between you and the customer’s bank. There are free merchant accounts offered by PayPal or Google which are okay to use if you do very little credit card processing. However, if you do more than a handful of credit card transactions, you should be using a regular merchant account provider like MerchantWarehouse. It is also important to know that free merchant accounts are really free. They are free in the sense that there is no upfront fee to use them, but they have higher merchant account fees that paid merchant accounts do. That is why you have to look at how many transactions you are going to process to decide if paying a small monthly fee is better than paying a higher transaction fee for each credit card payment that you process. No matter which merchant account you choose, it is essential to accepting credit cards.
After you set up your merchant account and decide how you are going to accept credit cards, you will then need to get the appropriate credit card machines. This can range from a traditional credit card machine where the credit card get swipes to an internet based program where you simply type in the credit card number to a mobile credit card processing program where you can process credit cards via a smart phone. Most of the best merchant accounts will offer cheap credit card equipment if you use their merchant account programs.
If you are running an online store you are also going to need a shopping cart and SSL certificate to accept credit cards. Both of these are essential to keeping your site secure which should be your number one priority. Shopping cart software allows you customers to place items in a virtual basket while they continue to shopping. They also assist in the checkout process by calculating taxes, shipping, and many other features. SSL certificates start to act once the customer inputs their personal data into your website and begins the purchase. The SSL certificates encrypt the personal information so that it is blocked from others that aren’t suppose to have access to it. Instead of sending the credit card number over the World Wide Web, it sends an encrypted number that has to be decrypted by the recipient.
While this may sound like a lot of work to accept credit cards, it really isn’t. Accepting Visa, MasterCard, and any other form of “plastic” will help your business so much!
