This overview is intended to help you understand what
the word "E-Commerce" means and what you need to know in
order to turn your web site into an online store.
There are three major requirements for setting up a fully
functional e-commerce website: a shopping cart, a payment
gateway, and a merchant account. Differentiating among these
three items can be somewhat confusing, so Cape Cod E-Com
takes many steps to make this process easier, both for experienced
customers using custom developed applications and for customers
using Cape Cod E-Com's "off-the-shelf" shopping carts/storefronts.
When building your web site you need to ask the following
questions:
Are you going to use Cape Cod E-Com's CartPoint to handle
your shopping cart/storefront or are you developing your
own shopping cart application?
Do you need real time credit card processing?
Do you have a merchant account set up?
Do you need to have "secure web pages" in order to accept
credit card information from your customers? If so, do you
wish to use Cape Cod E-Com's secure web site, or create
your own on your web site?
Before you start your e-commerce endeavor, you will want
to choose whether you are going to use Cape Cod E-Com's
shopping cart system or a custom developed application.
Using our pre-built and customizable solution gives you
many advantages:
Low development time for your website, quicker to the market
Support for MANY different processing companies which are
fully integrated into the software and require little development.
The ability to customize your shopping cart to fit your
website.
Upgrades and new functionality available periodically without
the need for new development work.
However, a custom-developed shopping cart system has benefits
of its own:
Fully customizable and built to requirements.
The store can be developed towards the different Payment
Gateways Cape Cod E-Com supports.
Built using the scripting environment (ASP, .NET, ColdFusion,
Perl, etc.) of your choice.
Complete knowledge of your store in case of problems.
Do you need real time credit card
processing?
When setting up a website you need to know if you want to
process credit cards online via a "payment gateway" or off-line
at a Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal. Both systems work basically
the same: they verify the credit card number, check the
expiration date, confirm the card has available credit,
send the information to your merchant account, and send
an approved or declined message to you or your shopping
cart. Cape Cod E-Com supports many of the most popular payment
gateways, and most can be accessed for use with your custom
shopping cart. Payment Gateway companies are services you
must subscribe to, so there are fees involved with setting
gateways up. These fees vary and may include a setup fee,
a monthly fee, and per transaction fees (or any combination
of all three). Gateways interact with your merchant account
to charge a credit card authorization) and collect the money
to deposit into your bank account (settlement).
Cape Cod E-Com supports U.S. Merchant Services, Verisign
PayFlowPro, Cybercash, and Authorize.Net as well as other
gateways. As there are so many other Payment Gateways available,
we are unable to know whether we have the tools already
available for them to work. However in most cases, we can
support your payment gateway. Please contact us if you do
not see it listed.
Do you have a merchant account
set up?
So you have a shopping cart, and a payment gateway. Now
you need a way to accept payments made for the products
you sell. A "merchant account" is a type of relationship
you have with a bank or other financial institution to accept
and deposit credit card payments. Generally, your local
bank will have a process or service in place that allows
for online transactions. If not, or if they want to charge
fees that are unacceptable to you, there are a myriad of
other companies who specialize in merchant accounts. As
with payment gateways, a merchant account is a service,
and there are fees associated with this service. Fees can
range from application and/or setup fees, licensing fees,
discount rates (a fee that goes to the bank and the processor
to cover the costs of the transaction), monthly service
fees, per transaction fees. Merchant accounts may have two
other types of fees: a reserve fund, which may be required
to cover charge backs, and charge back fees, which are similar
to NSF fees a bank charges for returned checks. Try doing
a search for "merchant account" in your search engine of
choice and the possibilities are endless.
Do you need to have "secure web
pages" in order to accept credit card information from your
customers?
If so, do you wish to use Cape Cod E-Com's secure web site,
or create your own on your web site?
When taking customers' Credit Card numbers, your customers
want to be assured that data is being sent securely over
the Internet. Technologies like "SSL encryption" are used
to encrypt data as it is being sent, so that the information
cannot be intercepted and read in transit. SSL encryption
requires the use of a "Certificate", which can be thought
of as a "key" that "locks" the incoming data, and "unlocks"
it when it arrives so the information can be used.
As you may have guessed, there is a cost to obtain these
"Certificates". You have two options when hosting with Cape
Cod E-Com.
We allow our customers (Shared Intermediate and higher)
to "borrow" the Cape Cod E-Com certificate. We provide you
with a sub-directory of the Cape Cod E-Com web site that
you can put web pages on that require security. An example
of this would be:
https://www.capecodecom.com/yourdomain/pagename.htm
Note the "https", the "s" is needed to display the web page
in "secure" mode.
If this not an option, and you would rather have your own
certificate, then you will want to purchase it from a company
like Thawte or Verisign. Once "installed" you can secure
any page. An example of this would be:
https://www.yourdomain.com.
If you have any questions, please contact us. We will be
happy to answer any questions you may have.
