By Adriana Noton

A payment gateway for business owners who operate their business online is extremely important. This is their only connection to assist in accepting and gathering payments for the products that they sell, commonly known as e-commerce.

Payment gateways make the process of conducting transactions between customer and merchant automatic. They actually take care of pretty much everything, including processing, verification and acceptance of the credit or debit cards being used to make the payments. Having a payment gateway allows the business owner to securely accept a variety of different payment types as long as their is a live internet connection available.

The process of accepting payments online is not much different than it is accepting payments in a brick and mortar store front. In bother instances, the customer picks out the items they want to buy. In a brick and mortar location they would then give their card to the cashier to make their purchase. Online, however, the customer can not actually hand their card over so instead they enter the information from the card in to an online form for processing.

The information that the customer will enter is the card number, the CVV number from the back of the card and also the name of the card holder as it is printed on the card itself. The payment is then deducted from the card holders account and in a matter of just a few short days it is credited in to the merchants account, thus fulfilling the transaction process.

A payment gateway is more secure than one might think. Even so, there are some precautions you should still take to ensure your safety. This can be done by always making sure you only make purchases from trusted sites. Also, you can look for an s right after the http in the websites address. This lets you know they are processing your information on a secure server.

This doesn’t always guarantee that the site you are on is completely secure. However, it is a nice precaution to take. The S in the website address greatly reduces the chances of your information being compromised however. Now, for business owners, this doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t create your own payment gateway. Doing so, might be better than you think.

A gateway that you have created yourself can actually create a more secure feeling for your customers since it will be obvious that you took the time to actually create one instead of getting someone else to just host one for you. Another added bonus, is that they fit a specific website theme much better and aren’t covered in ads from third parties becuase you are simply using one from another place.

Running an online business from home can actually make doing this somewhat more expensive as far as merchant services go, but the fact that your customers feel more secure is enough to outweigh the cost.

Creating your own gateway also means you can fix problems more quickly when they occur. Using an outside source for this means you have to wait for them to fix problems and that can sometimes take days which might result in the loss of quite a few customers. A customer that encounters problems at checkout will usually leave and not come back, but instead find what they are looking for somewhere else.