Running a buy, sell or trade business online may be a little bit more complicated that what you first thought it would be. After setting up your ecommerce website and uploading your inventory, you still need to find a way to start processing credit cards online.

PayPal is always a good option to receive your payments. There are a lot of other providers out there that work in the same way. However, if you want to capture credit card payments, then you’ll need a secure payment gateway.

Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores, online sellers have a more complicated billing method. Ground stores have physical point-of-sale terminals for swiping credit cards and cash registers to ring in the sale. Merchants who sell online, on the other hand, rely on online shopping cards and a payment processor.

From your site, your potential buyers select their items and place it in your shopping cart. If it is a service you are selling online, then a merchant order form is usually used. When setting this up, it is important to secure the page (you may use https for such purposes). This would allow your customers to trust you more so you can obtain sensitive information such as credit card numbers, shipping address and other important data.

Your merchant order form or shopping cart then interacts with your payment gateway. The payment gateway takes the information and encrypts the data. This is an essential function of the payment gateway. When choosing a vendor, select one that manages and directs data streams in real time, it should also offer the industry standard 128-bit secure socket layer (SSL) data encryption key. Additional features may include IP address location check, BIN country matching and address verification.

The payment is then sent over to the processing banks for collection and charging of the credit card. A payment gateway can help protect you from uncessary chargebacks, refunds and fraudulent transactions.