Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Ecommerce Shopping Cart - Part 2
 by: Danna Henderson

Merchant services are beneficial for very small businesses or those that are just starting and don’t have a lot of orders. Merchant services provide the merchant account, gateway, hosted shopping cart and will maintain your customer’s personal information. They usually require a set-up fee between 50 and 200 dollars, transaction fee between 30 and 75 cents, and 5% to 10% of each transaction. Because you are using their merchant account, your customer’s credit card statement will show the merchant services business name not yours. In some cases, customers will not recognize the charge and may dispute it.

Merchant service shopping carts have an administrative interface, which allows you to login to your account to add products, prices and shipping options. The shopping cart generates the html for the purchase buttons and you simply copy and paste the html into your web pages. When your customer clicks on the purchase button, he is taken to another website to enter the credit card information. This indicates to the customer that you are a small business. Some potential customers will abandon the shopping cart rather than enter their credit card information on a website they know nothing about.

Once your business grows to the point where you are processing over $1000 a month, it’s more cost effective to apply for your own merchant account and switch to either a hosted shopping cart (little or no programming) or a fully integrated shopping cart (programming required).

Page 3 of Cart Shopping Software Article - Hosted Shopping Cart