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Do you have, or are you planning to start, an ecommerce website company? Then you absolutely must have a method of accepting payment online. Since you most likely will never even see your customers, and they won't be able to hand you their credit card in person, how are you going to process their payment?

The first thing you need is a merchant bank account in which to deposit the money you receive for payment. The procedure for opening an ecommerce merchant account is quite lengthy and complicated, but that is the subject of another article.

The bank itself will not handle the process of verifying that the customer's card is acceptable. That task is done by a credit card processing service. This service acts as a kind of middle-man. The card-issuing bank is contacted for authorization, and to debit the customer's account. Then the money for the transaction is transferred to your ecommerce merchant account.

Before any of this can happen, however, your website must initiate the entire process by having your customer fill out forms. As you know, there are two different kinds of forms that must be completed before an order can be processed.

1. The shopping cart form collects information about the purchases made by the customer, and need not be on a secure web page.

2. The checkout page, however, collects sensitive information about the customer's credit card, and needs to be protected from being viewed by anyone but the customer and the credit card processing service.

Here is where you must make an important decision. You can have the checkout page on your own website, or you can use a credit card processing service that provides you with a page on their website for the customer to use for a checkout page. There are numerous pros and cons about which method to use, but again that is the subject of a different article.

There is a way to bypass the hassle of having to apply for an ecommerce merchant account and credit card processing service. There are third-party credit card processors, such as PayPal, that take care of both functions. Of necessity, their fees are somewhat higher. But such services may be necessary if you have difficulty obtaining a merchant bank account.