The Advantages of Selling Online

Selling online has a number of advantages over selling by conventional methods, including:

• Low set-up and operational costs. You don’t need to pay shop assistants, rent high-street premises, or answer a lot of pre-sales queries.
• Reduced order-processing costs.
• Reach a global audience.
• Compete with larger businesses by being open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Attract customers who would not normally have investigated your type of high-street outlet.
• Analyse shopping trends and customer purchases
• Use your online shop as a catalogue for existing customers.

Accepting card payments online

Card payments allow you to take advantage of impulse buyers, international customers and of course the increasing number of consumers looking for the convenience of shopping online.

There are usually two ways in which you can accept credit cards on your site:

1. Using Your Own Merchant Account. To do this, you will need a bank that will allow you to open a merchant account. Best suited to larger scale online stores.

2. Through a Third Party Merchant. There are numerous companies around that are willing to accept card payments on your behalf such as PayPal and Google Checkout. These are perfect for start up businesses and smaller online stores.

Which Method Should You Use?

The initial costs of opening your own merchant account is higher than when you use a third party merchant, which most have no set-up fee at all.

However, the transaction fee (which is what you pay the bank or third party merchant for each sale) is much higher when you use a third party as compared to when using your own merchant account.

Unless you already have a merchant account or are confident of reaching a high sales volume straight away, it would be advisable to initially use a third party merchant to ‘test the waters’.