In times of fast paced business solutions, the concept of E-Commerce is fast gaining momentum. The term basically refers to conducting and accepting payments online through the Internet. Even if you do not have an online store, you can increase your business sales by accepting credit card payments. This is because you may have customers who prefer making their payments by credit cards. To accept payments through credit cards, you will need a merchant account in any financial institution and the services of an Internet gateway provider organization. Processed payments will be deposited in your merchant account.

To connect to the gateway account, your company website will need some technical modifications to accept credit payments. The web developer will add an order for to a shopping cart, where a customer can add personal details as well as credit card information.

As a part of the merchant services

, the gateway organization will validate the credit card information by sending the details to a credit card provider company. After the validation, the gateway will receive an acceptance or decline message depending on the authenticity of the information. The message will be displayed on the screen. After getting the acceptance message, the payment will be transmitted to the merchant account.

These payment gateways provide payment solutions to web merchants, telephone order merchants, retail and mobile merchants. Web merchants can connect to the gateways through server-to-server connection for submitting transactions to the payment gateway.

There is also the Simple Integration Method(SIM). Here, the gateway monitors the entire transaction process data collection, data procession and response to the merchant. On the other hand, the retail merchants can purchase certified, ready-to-install POS(Point of Sale) solution or a device that is integrated to the gateway organization.