Once you have your ecommerce site set up and your inventory is uploaded with your shopping cart and you are ready to go, you still have to think about how your customers will pay for their products.

Between your shopping cart and your merchant account you need an extra step known as a payment gateway. This program allows you to send information securely between your sites shopping cart and the merchant account. Not only do payment gateways help your site communicate with the bank that your merchant account is with but they offer other features depending on what payment gateway you get. Some will offer fraud protection, help you issue refunds, and some will even help you configure your check out page that will be one of the last impressions a customer sees when they do business with you.

Your payment gateway is a key feature in your ecommerce web hosting. This is one of the many steps that you will take to see to your customer’s privacy. You also want to protect yourself from fraud and losing your own information.

Naturally payment gateways can’t work alone. They do need to be easily integrated into your sites shopping cart and your merchant account. These three things should provide you with a seamless ability to do ecommerce transactions.

The fees on payment gateways vary so you will want to shop around. We suggest going through Authorize.net. They are not the actual payment gateway provider but they are a reliable reseller that you can count on. You can compare different companies and go with the one that feels right for your business.