What to Look for in a Payment Processing Solution | Electronic Commerce (Charles River Media Networking/Security)

Finding a reliable, secure, and flexible payment processing solution for your business is critical, so it’s important to take the time to investigate and assess the options available to you. A payment processing solution should:

Reliably and cost-effectively accept and process a variety of payment types, including credit cards and electronic checks. Not only does this reduce lost sales, but it also enhances the quality of your site by allowing your customers the freedom and flexibility to pay you quickly and conveniently.
Provide real-time credit card authorization results allowing you to accept or reject orders immediately and reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions.
Easily track and manage payments from multiple payment types or processors so you can spend more time on your business, not on managing transactions.
Provide recurring billing payment services, allowing you to set up scheduled payment charges to your customers. For example, you can set up automatically recurring charges for items such as membership dues or for installment payments. Recurring billing is an important feature that provides added convenience for both you and your customer.
Be able to act as a virtual terminal to allow for processing offline transactions. This gives you the flexibility to process orders received via telephone, fax, e-mail, or in person.
Provide and store transaction records allowing you to easily search for transactions and create transaction reports.
Scale rapidly and seamlessly to accommodate increased transaction volumes so your systems grow as your business grows.
Provide flexible, easy integration with the merchant’s Web site. The sooner you can start accepting payments, the sooner you start generating revenue from your site.
Be able to work with all the leading Internet merchant accounts, which allows you to switch your banking relationship and not have to worry about installing new software or performing new integrations.
Be provided by a well-established and trustworthy company. This ensures that your payment service provider will continue to provide reliable payment services as well as new features^[1].

Getting Started Now

You can start accepting payments online in three easy steps:

Choose and purchase a payment solution that fits your needs.
Set up the payment solution on your Web site.
Set up your Internet merchant account^[1].

Accepting payments online is an important step in growing your business.