How Good is Your Payment Gateway

I went to a small college in a small town, which was quite a change from the city I grew up in - Dallas.

My college town essentially had one of everything. One grocery store, one drug store, one clothing store, one shoe store - starting to get the picture?

Now if you had a car you could drive to the next town if you couldn’t find what you wanted. But that was a 35-mile drive, so most of us learned to go with the flow in our little town.

I bring this up because I now have an online business and no one has to drive 35 miles if they want to check out my competition. Heck, just punch "oil paints" into a shopping search engine and you’ll get over 500,000 results. Now I know there aren’t that many Internet businesses selling oil paints, but even if there are 100,000 that is a heck of a lot of competitors.

I mean, can you imagine 100,000 grocery stores in your neighborhood? Just buying a loaf of bread might be enough to make you dizzy.

This is why I have worked hard to give my online enterprise every possible edge because in my mind when someone comes to my site they have so much money they intend to spend and my job is to get it from their pocket into my pocket. Not to mention keep them from clicking somewhere else.

My goal is that every person who shows up on my site makes a purchase. That may be a tad ambitious, but what the heck - why not shoot for the stars? So I made sure I had a catchy domain name, I have a reliable hosting service and my suppliers hustle to keep my business.

However, my greatest asset is the fact that I signed with a top-flight credit card processing online provider. Because a good name is nice, a good host is nice and good inventory is nice - but I have found that if people do not find the option to pay using their credit card those other three items aren’t going to close the sale.

And trust me; I know what I’m talking about. I sat down at the computer and did some research about ecommerce merchant account services. More than 80 percent of everything bought online is paid for using a credit card. So if there are billions of dollars just do the math. You take 80 percent of billions and that translates into a lot of money, some of which I want to end up in my pocket.

Yes, there are costs associated with having credit card processing services. But the increased amount of business, plus the increased amount of repeat business that has come my way since I started to accept credit cards has more than paid for what I write a check for monthly to process credit cards.

I think every online business needs and can benefit from having outstanding merchant services. Except those ‘net stores competing with me – let them do it the old fashioned way!

Jim Osterman is a Web content developer with SecurePay.com, a payment gateway company that offers great virtual terminal solutions to online business owners.