Websites 4 Small Business

Services: Increase Revenue by Adding e-Commerce to Your Website

Could you do more business if you  . . .

  • Make it easy for customers to buy immediately?
  • Offer discounts for on-line purchases?
  • Show current inventory items or delivery dates?

Which solution is best for you?

You can start at the simplest level, and expand as your business grows.

PayPal offers a full range of financial merchant services.

Buy-now buttons can be programmed for different amounts of money. For example, Chamber of Commerce events often cost less for members than non-members. These amounts can be programmed “on the fly” by the processing script.

Add to cart buttons can calculate sales taxes and shipping in addition to quantities. They also offer two “customizable” entries, such as an item size or color.

Other financial merchant vendors offer similar services. Using PayPal (or any other merchant account vendor) means establishing an account with them. Fees are generally modest.

Gather credit-card information online.

If you already take credit cards and have a physical “card-swiper machine,” we can gather and store the relevant information on a secure server.

You then retrieve the information via a secure connection on a page we build for this purpose, and input the information manually.

This option means getting a security certificate for your website. The cost varies from roughly $50 to $250/year, depending on which vendor and level of service you choose.

Never send credit card information via email. Email is not secure: You risk your customer’s information being stolen!

Take payments online.

You need a merchant account that accepts on-line credit-card transactions from websites. These are available at your bank or other financial institutions. We then:

  1. Get a security certificate for your website.
  2. Create a page for ordering your products or services.
  3. Build an e-commerce link so the credit-card payment goes directly to your bank account.

Full-scale shopping cart

The “next step up” is adding a database with SKUs, prices, descriptions, photos, and the like — together with data about the customer: what's now in their cart, credit card information, ship-to addresses, etc.

  
Call for a free consultation to discuss your business goals and how your website can help you achieve them.

pink piggy bank