Tools for Your Web Business

If your business has a website, direct sales are not necessarily the sole, nor even the primary reason for maintaining it.

Having a web prescence helps promote your brand and provides essential information about your products and services. In fact, if your business is primarily services, it is unlikely that you wouold require an on-line sales system.

However if you sell physical goods, or pre-sell software, or educational services, a web-site makes sense as a way to expand your offerings and create opportunities for more sales. As your customers become aware of the convenience and security of paying on-line, your business can make life easier for them, by offering a secure payments system.

Making life easier for your customers does not mean that it will simplify your business, or that you will find the transition to a payments system painless. This is intended as a beginners guide, that will help you to plan your on-line payments system.

Establishing your payment system at even the most basic level will require planning; who processes amd then packages your goods? Will you need to provide invoices, or receipts? If you already perform some of these functions in your business you will have some procedures in place that you should be able to translate across to your web-site. There are specialised software packages that can help in managing the process, by automating labels and such. But you should be aware that there will be additional work that needs to be done.

To accept payments and orders from your website there will several related technologies that will be needed.

1. You will need to list the products and services that you offer. If you are just offering a few products on your site the simplest way is to add descriptions by using your content management system (CMS) If your offering is extensive, you will probably need dedicated software to handle the complexities of a catalogue. There are a number of open-source systems, and ecommerce offerings available - if you have trouble finding something that suits, contact me...

2.You will need to accept payments. For a small scale business, PayPal will process transactions via a "Buy Now" button. This is probably easiest for small operations. All that is required is for you to set-up a PayPal account and add to your web-site. Make sure you register for a premium account as the fees are lower than for a personal account. PayPal have a facility where you can cut and paste the HTML code for a "Pay Now" button into your CMS at the appropriate place.

For larger scale operations you may find it advantageous to have your payments processed more directly. This will mean a number of elements: a merchant account, and a payment getway service to handle the processing. The merchant account will be required for the processing of credit cards; some merchant accounts include a payment gateway service.

If you have any problems with any of these elements, you can contact me for help...