Ecommerce Merchant

Video Transcription

Good day and thank you for taking a moment to watch this video. My name is Matt Crawford and I'm with Quantum Merchant Services and I'm going to spend the next few moments talking about what it means to be an eCommerce Merchant.

When we talk about eCommerce Merchant, in very simple terms we're talking about the ability for you as a merchant to accept payments via your website. We aren't talking about a scenario where your customer or your potential customer goes on your website, sees a product they want to buy and picks up the phone and orders it. Nor are we talking about a scenario where your customer or your potential customer goes on the website, maybe completes a form with their name, address, what they want to purchase, their credit card information and that form is emailed to you and someone in your back office takes that information and puts the credit card information in particular into a more traditional standalone device. Neither of those scenarios that we talked about are how we're going to define eCommerce Merchant.

We define eCommerce Merchant as a merchant whose website allows customers to key in their own credit card information. And this is an important point to emphasize. The card holder is keying in the information into your website. This means you as the merchant really don't have a role to play in that payment being processed. Payments can be processed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without your involvement as the merchant.

In order to be an eCommerce Merchant , there are only a few things you need. You need a website listing the products you sell and you need a payment gateway. A payment gateway simply takes or simply captures the credit card information , your card holder's input, and sends it off for authorization. And of course it sends that transaction off for settling to see you get paid. So two very, very basic things you need: a website and a payment gateway. I'm oversimplifying a little bit. These can be very elaborate solutions, security that's required, sometimes shopping carts are required but take from this that being an eCommerce Merchant, and you can do it at a very basic, simple stage. You can do the website yourself, you can go to a web designer and have the website done but you can be fairly simplistic tour through the products you sell or the services you provide.

So again, we talk about what it means or what it takes to be an eCommerce Merchant. We're simply talking about the ability for your customers to key in their credit card information to your website.

I hope you found this informative.

Thank you.