Accepting Credit Card Payments on Your Website

While creating your business's website is a relatively simple task, the next step you are probably asking yourself is how an online business goes about accepting credit cards through its website. The process, though a bit lengthy, is fairly simple and straightforward.

The first thing an online entrepreneur should be thinking about is merchant account status. In order to process a customer's credit card through a web site, a business owner must have a certain line of credit. Another way to look at merchant account status is to view it as back up for fraud, returns or just getting paid for selling your product via someone's credit card.

If you have good enough credit and have been with your bank for a long time, you may be able to get merchant status through your bank. Many times small business owners are unsuccessful in achieving this, so try local, smaller banks or attempt to consolidate all of your bank accounts at one bank.

If you are not having any luck with a bank, or just don't want to deal with a bank, there are several companies that specialize in helping you get off the ground in terms of becoming an online merchant.

If you are big on researching all of your options, just google merchant account status and you will be met with a myriad of choices. However, if you are new to all of this, you may be overwhelmed with just the basic search. So, when looking into companies such as VeriSign, Credit Card Processing Services or 21st Century Resources, it is good to keep a few things in mind.

For starters, if you are just launching your business (meaning you will have sales transactions of less than 1,000 monthly) be prepared to pay around a $200 startup fee plus a monthly processing fee of $20 per month. Obviously, the more transactions you start getting, the higher the processing cost.