Financial Planner Articles

When setting up an ecommerce merchant account or when accepting credit cards online, you usually have two components, the merchant account itself and what’s called a “gateway account”. If you have done any research into this topic, you’ll probably have heard of a few different gateway companies. This article is about the gateway account and how that relates to the internet merchant account.

Shopping online is one retail activity that seems to be thriving, even during tough economic times. More people are now using the internet for their shopping needs. According to a recent study released by McAfee, Inc., the worlds biggest security company, and carried out by Harris Interactive, “72% of consumers said the economy has not changed the way they shop online.” Instead, the study revealed that “fears about online security and personal information are the biggest drivers behind terminated online sales.” The study also found that, “nearly half of consumers have terminated an order or abandoned their shopping cart due to security concerns.”

If you run an online business, fraud is one of your biggest fears. You lose money and products when fraudulent purchases are made, and sometimes it feels as though there is nothing you can do to fight it. While fraud is a very real problem, there are things you can do to fight if you do your homework beforehand.

Point of sale equipment is the equipment that is used to process a sale. The cash register that the cashier uses, the credit card machine, the retail software and the check printer are all pieces of point of sale equipment and they are all needed any time money or some form of payment is exchanging hands.

We live in a day and time when it is very rare to walk into a place of business and not be able to pay with a credit or debt card. Actually, when a person walks into a business that does not allow credit or debt card payments, the customer can become extremely annoyed. As a matter of fact, they may walk out and not come back. This is because they do not want to have to hunt for an ATM machine and come back. They want to walk into the business, get what they want, and pay for it with the means that they have to pay for it. Its as simple as that.