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Merchant accounts, accept credit cards online and other payment processing solutions is vitally important to the success of your business. The fact is, your businesses success or failure can depend on whether or not you accept credit card orders.

In today's increasingly Internet-intensive economy, an entirely new group of companies need merchant accounts that allow them to accept credit cards. Whereas yesterday's credit card capabilities were designed (and priced) with yesterday's typically big-business, brick-and-mortar company in mind, today's solutions must be far more flexible.

Fortunately, if you know where to look, you can find solutions flexible enough for even the most innovative business requirements.

Payment gateways

A payment gateway is a separate service and acts as an intermediary between the merchants' shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers' credit card issuer and your merchant account. Think of it as a EFTPOS terminal in cyberspace. It checks for validity, encrypts transaction details, ensures they are sent to the correct destination and then decrypts the responses which are sent back to the shopping cart.

This is a seamless process and your customer does not directly interact with the gateway; as data is forwarded to the gateway via your shopping cart and a secure (SSL) connection.
The shopping cart is configured via plugins to send information in a format that is acceptable to the particular gateway.
The proper choice of payment gateway is another vital element which will contribute to your success or failure as an online business.

Selecting an Internet merchant account provider or third party processor:

Shop around and then shop around some more - this is a very confusing section of ecommerce. If you make enquiries with a company and they don't respond within 24 hours, or are somewhat vague in their responses - run like hell away from them. Banks are notorious for utilizing poorly trained salespeople rather than those with hands-on product knowledge or an understanding the complexities of ecommerce.

Here we present companies providing payment processing services (also known as "payment gateways") ...side by side!