The web offers businesses and even individuals an extremely low-cost and user-friendly platform for selling products, and with recent developments the overhead has been reduced to the point where you could in fact set up your own online store for free (this wasn’t always the case).
Perhaps the most daunting and least understood task of selling products online for business owners is the ‘shopping cart’ and the ‘payment gateway’. The first part of this series we will clarify what exactly a shopping cart is and how it works.
What is a Shopping Cart?
Put simply, a shopping cart is a system which enables users to select products on a website, which are then put in a temporary virtual container called a ‘shopping cart’.
When the user is ready he can then pay for the products. As soon as he enters’ his credit card info and presses the ‘pay’ button he is now in the realm of the ‘payment gateway’.
What is a Payment Gateway?
People can add, remove and modify the products inside your shopping cart all day long, but it will be pointless unless they can enter their credit card info and have their bank communicate with your bank and make the transaction.
For this, third party credit card processing companies offer their services, such as: Paypal, Verisign and Authorize.net. They receive the information the user submits from the shopping cart, and then their system performs the bank transactions and approves or declines the transaction. The approval/decline is info is then sent to your shopping cart, which will then take you to an appropriate ‘thank you page’ or an ‘error page’.
In Summary
Products are added and removed from the ‘cart’ at the users’ digression. He can also modify certain aspects about them (such as quantity or size, color). Once the user is finished shopping he can then ‘checkout’, where he will enter his credit card information, and that information will then be sent to a payment gateway for processing. If the transaction is successful the user will be redirected to a ‘thank you page’, giving him details of his orders. The owner of the online store will then get an automatic email from the payment gateway that a product has been purchased and that the money has been put in his bank account.
What’s Next?
In our next article we will discuss the simplest and most affordable way to get your store up and running: how to make your shopping cart and what payment gateway to choose.
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