Dos & Don’ts for taking payments online
Taking payments online is the heart of each eCommerce site. If your customers can’t pay you, then your shop loses its purpose.
In this series, we want to focus on which payment processor to choose. The review is from a UK perspective and offline methods (bank transfer, cheque) are not covered, although for some sites they can be useful (B2B customers often prefer offline payment).
What’s a payment processor and why do I need one?
A payment processor takes care of the card processing. If you’ve got a shop with a terminal for putting through cards, then you may wonder whether you need one. And yes, you do! Don’t ever be tempted to store card details yourself and put them through manually.
Card processors can roughly be divided into the ones where you also need an internet merchant account (IMA) from a bank (e.g. ProtX) and those where you only need an account with payment processor (e.g. PayPal). We’ll be talking more about IMAs in later posts.
