If you have products and/or services that can be sold online then you might like to enable sales on your website. To do this you need to be able to accept suitable payment methods such as credit and debit cards.

Starting from scratch this would involve running secure encrypted protocols that interface with banking networks and is way beyond the scope of most web site projects. Thankfully there are a number of payment providers who offer payment services in a secure environment and take the responsibility for managing your customers financial details.

These services all work on the same principal, you determine who your customer is through a registration process and what they wish to purchase using a shopping cart system. Once they are ready to complete their purchase, your site must send them to the payment provider for completion of the payment process. The payment provider will then inform your website of a successful or unsuccessful payment and the transaction can either be forwarded to you for processing or cancelled.

We have experience of building eCommerce enabled web sites that integrate with the following well known payment providers:

Worldpay are part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and provide a facility to take credit and debit card payments online. You must open an account with them and there are set up fees, regular monthly fees and a commission taken from every transaction. The commission varies depending on the type of card used but in our experience you can negotiate a better deal with them after you have been using the service for a few months.

Their website is at http:///www.worldpay.com

Originally developed to partner the hugely popular auction site ebay, PayPal now offers a much wider range of facilities. With PayPal you can take credit and debit card payments without your customer needing to have a PayPal account. If they do have a PayPal account then they can also transfer funds directly from their bank account.

There is no fixed cost to sign up to use PayPal for online payments but there is a sliding scale of transaction costs based on the volume and magnitude of sales with each sale attracting a transaction fee based on this scale.

Their website is at http:///www.paypal.com

Checkout is the online payment facility of web giant Google. It works in a similar way to PayPal with no fixed cost but a per transaction cost based on the magnitude and volume of sales. If you pay for advertising on Google through their adwords programme then you can get discounted rates on card processing.

Their website is at http:///checkout.google.com

There are many other payment facilities available, ProtX, SecureTrading, Netbanx to name a few. For larger organisations you can also have a transparent solution where all web site operations are done on your servers including the recording of your customers payment details. You then submit the payment request behind the scenes to receive a positive or negative response.

We are more than happy to work with your choice of online payment provider and provide advice on the numerous options available.