Accepting credit cards is a vital part of any online business. Although South Africa is far behind the rest of the world, offering EFT as your only form of payment is no longer enough. With that in mind, it's important for you to know what your options are. Here is a short outline of some companies in South Africa that offer online credit card processing.
Pay Gate
These guys offer a pretty standard service and you will need to have a merchant account with Standard Bank.
It's generally recommended that you have a programmer on your side if you choose to use this company. The last time I worked with them, their support was good but their solutions weren't quite as easy to implement as they could have been.
iVeri
This company works through Nedbank and offers very similar services to PayGate. I generally wouldn't recommend a company like this to a small business that is just starting out as it will require more resources than you are likely to have at hand.
Setcom
This company is, by far, my favourite online credit card processor. They've been around since 1999 but have recently started a similar service to PayPal.
In essence, they allow you to charge credit cards without having a merchant account. This means that you can get up and running much faster as it can often take over three months to successfully applied for a merchant account at one of the major banks.
Another wonderful benefit of using Setcom is that they make it super easy for you to add "Buy Now" buttons to your web site.
On top of that (yes -- there is more!) you can sign up for free right now and be up and running within a couple of hours. No other provider that I know of offers this.
There are plenty of solutions that you can consider that Setcom is probably your best bet as a small business.
Pricetag
Unlike the other companies have mentioned so far, I have had no firsthand experience with this company. They come highly recommended by an associate of mine. Their web site looks really good so I recommend you check them out before making a decision.
If you're not selling online, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. People want to buy your products now, not tomorrow. If you're not set up for e-commerce, they'll simply take their business to your competitor.
Payment gateways have become crucial for online businesses, especially websites that directly sell commodities to customers ? such as eBay - and service/advertising oriented portals. Its advantages are manifold. Firstly, having an online payment gateway ensures lesser operating costs in terms of less number of personnel. It virtually does the job of a billing counter clerk. Secondly, anyone can access and use the online payment gateway to make the payments at any time of his/her convenience, and from any place on this globe. In other words, there is no fixed working hours with payment gateways. It works 24x7. Thirdly, it is real time ? the customers could know if their credit card payments has been accepted or not ? is secure ? no room for hacking - and offers charge back facility.
Payment gateways usually come in these two forms or architecture - a secure order form or a merchant side application, hosted in the same server. The former takes the customers to a third party secured environment ? that of a credit card company or payment service provider ? to make the payments, while in the latter case, to a merchant-side application program interface (here, the credit card processing code is integrated into the server hosting the merchant-side application). The former is however the safer of the designs.
From a customer point of view, before revealing their credit card numbers to any website, it is imperative that they check and verify the authenticity and security of the online payment gateway they are interacting with. There could be fraudulent ones around put up with the sole purpose of stealing the private details of the customers and nothing else. In order to discern chalk from cheese, some education in the same could come really handy.
Here are some security features that really work and something that genuine online merchants with credit card transacting features employ in their portals.
1.Dynamic IP Protection: The system verifies the IP the same IP used in the previous successful session for any further online money transfer request. 2.Digital Signature: This is the safest bet. Digital signature ensures that the system is hack proof, even if the id has been hacked. From a user point of view, one should opt for an online payment gateway for sure if it offers digital signature. 3.128-bit security with SSL: This method ensures that the financial transactions are encrypted from the user browser ? whichever it is ? with a 128 bit encryption key.
All popular websites have genuine payment gateways. However, be careful with newer/less popular ones.
Thomas H. Lindblom has sinced written about articles on various topics from Health, About Web Hosting and Pets. Thomas H. Lindblom is the author of this article on . Find more information about. Thomas H. Lindblom's top article generates over 110000 views. to your Favourites.