Why have an online payment system
Personal computers and laptops are now part of our day to day lives. A majority of people nowadays do a lot of their work using a computer, surf the web, use it for entertainment and socialise online. Thus it is inevitable that eventually those computer users would have at some point made a purchase online for goods or services. Buying stuff online is now very streamlined and secure when vendors make use of authorised merchant accounts or other alternate online payment systems such as PayPal.
An online payment system in essence is a feature of an ecommerce website that facilitates the acceptance of payments for online transactions. The widespread use of the internet-based shopping and banking has driven the popularity of online payment systems making them an increasingly popular feature to have on a website to allow you to sell goods or services.
By having an online payment system on your website means that customer can make online purchases on your website from their home or mobile phone. A recent Econsultancy report which looked at e-commerce consumer behaviour in both the UK and US showed that 34% of UK shoppers would prefer to buy online, with 55% opting for the high street. While this stat shows that offline retail still has the majority, 34% is still a sizeable portion of the sample showing the increase advantage of selling online.
Allowing a consumer to purchase your product/service online provide them with many advantages. Shoppers don’t have to face the crowds of people in the stores or retail outlets. They can just order what they want from the comfort of their own home. Consumers can also search the web to compare prices and research the items before they buy it.
Also consumers can be assured that their purchases are secure because any website that has an online payment system which takes credit and debit card details has to be PCI DSS compliant. PCI DSS compliance is the worldwide security set out by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. PCI DSS was created to help websites that takes online payments the ability to prevent credit card fraud through increased security controls.
So if you are a website owner and you don’t sell your goods or services online using an online payment system, then you are missing out on a large percentage of revenue that your website can generate for you. You just need to make sure that the online payment systems you choose are PCI DSS complaint.