The Way you sell online

You think that it would be pretty easy to have somebody that wants to buy something from your website, to have that purchase go through, and have the money get deposited into your bank account. But there are actually several more steps involved, that’s why it can get confusing.

First of all, you need a Shopping Cart.

A website and a shopping cart are separate and should be separate, but shouldn’t be complicated to integrate the two.

A lot of times, there are a lot of shopping cart companies out there that have a lot of strengths and good shopping cart but they also try and convince you to manage your website from within the shopping cart. That doesn’t work so well, especially if you want a custom or real professional website.

Moving on, a shopping cart allows a customer that is on your website to select a part of the service that they want and add it to their shopping cart. They can then proceed to purchase that by entering their credit card information.

The next step is the gateway.

Once they have entered their credit card information, it’s a gateway that takes that credit card information and processes it to see if there’s authorization to proceed with that transaction. Once that is authorized, the gateway will then process that credit card, pull the funds and send it to the merchant account.  Now, the merchant account is where the funds will reside for a short time and you can set it up to automatically transfer the funds from that merchant account to your bank account or your credit union or your check account - whatever for your business.

So those are the steps.

It’s a little bit more involved than you might have thought originally just to make a simple sale on your website.

The simplest way that I recommend in getting started is the way that I used when I got started which is Paypal.

The reason why Paypal  is such a good place or Gateway to start is because it takes care of three things in one. Paypal is the shopping cart; it’s also the gateway and the merchant account. You can set up an account with Paypal.