By Adriana Noton

An internet payment gateway for business owners is vital when you are working from home, running an online business. It is the link that helps you accept payments for the goods or services that you are selling, otherwise know as e-commerce.

These internet payment gateways automate the process of transactions between customer and merchant. Payment gateways are essentially systems that process, verify and accept the credit card payments for you. This enables online business owners to accept all types of electronic payments through a safe and secure means as long as there is an internet connection.

The entire process works much the same as it does when you make a purchase in a brick and mortar store. A person buys the product and gives their credit or debit card to the cashier to pay for it. The only difference is that with an online payment gateway, the customer can not physically give their card to the cashier but rather enters the card information in to a secure form for processing.

The data the customer enters will include the credit card number, the name of the card holder and the 3 digit CVV number that is found on the back of the card. Their payment is then taken from the card and in a few days the total is credited to the merchants account.

These payment gateways are actually very secure, but even then a customer needs to be sure they are making a purchase on a trusted site. A good way to know for sure that the site is safe is to look for an S after the http in the web address of the site they are making a purchase from.

While this won’t guarantee the site is completely secure, it is a good place to start looking. That S means there is less of a chance that your information will be used for illicit transactions. Does this mean you you shouldn’t use a payment gateway you have designed yourself? No. Creating your own actually has a lot of benefits.

It gives the customer a sense of security in that you have developed your own secure merchant features instead of ripping something off the internet elsewhere. IT also blends nicely with the site because their aren’t dozens of third party advertising and other logos displayed everywhere.

Working from home to run an online business may cost you a little bit more when it comes to merchant services, but you are also giving your customers peace of mind and are able to fully control all of the merchant features.

This also means you don’t have to wait for someone else to fix a problem, should one occur. This can save valuable time and prevent you from losing customers simply because your merchant services are not working properly. There is nothing more frustrating to a customer than to get ready to check out after shopping on a site only to find out the cart is temporarily down. In most cases, they will seek a similar product elsewhere that they can purchase right away. This means you lost the sale as well as any chance of getting a repeat customer in the future.