E-Commerce Checklist

If you wish to sell products online and accept credit card payment here's a brief checklist of the things you'll need to do. They are in a "general order", however note that the decisions about banks, gateways and ecommerce applications are closely linked and as such the order will depend on decisions you make about each.  You need to find the most cost effective solution.  Cost effective does not mean the cheapest, it's the one that provides value for the features you need. If you choose StoreTiger as your e-commerce application we are happy to help you through this process.

• Realise that it will take some effort on your part to initially get your catalogue online, including organising images and descriptions of your products and getting the information into your online store. Of course, if budget permits you can always pay someone else to do this part for you. 
  
• Make sure that you have your supply (stock) and delivery (fulfillment) channels ready to go.  You must know up front how you are going to source your products and how you are going to fulfill orders and in particular what the delivery costs will be.
  
• Decide on which e-commerce application you want to use. Make sure that it can handle online transaction processing and deal with issues such at tax and calculation of delivery costs at the time of sale. Often people will not buy if they don't know the full price up front.
  
• If you want real time credit card processing, find a good value payment gateway that can talk to your bank (see next step) and to your ecommerce application. Find out the cost of integrating your ecommerce application with your choice of gateway. Most banks can provide you with access to their own online gateway. Gateways usually have a per transaction cost and/or a monthly cost. Sometimes third party gateways can integrate with your bank with less cost than your bank will provide access to their own system.
  
• Find the right bank to get a credit card merchant account from. Ensure they know you intend to accept payment over the internet, you'll usually get a "terminal id" that your web site will use to talk to the gateway. Shop around, some banks offer better merchant account fees than others. Watch out for fees, all banks will charge you  a percentage of your sales, possibly based on the size of the transactions and the monthly value of them. Some may also charge you a monthly fee. Many banks have rules about things you will need to have on your site, like refund policies, returns policies and they may want to see your site before approving your merchant account.
  
• Find out if you need a secure payment area and therefore access to a shared SSL Digital Certificate or if you need to/prefer to purchase your own.  This will depend on how you accept/process payment and what gateway you use.
  
• By now you should have made all the decisions and will know how much it's going to cost. So decide if it's going to be cost effective.
  
• It the budget's right, get your Credit Card Merchant Account set up,  the payment gateway account set up your developer to integrate your site with them.
  
• Add your products
  
• Start Selling!