In order for you to process customer payments on your website, you will require the services of an ecommerce merchant account to collect the money on your behalf and pay it into your bank account.

This is actually a process that is invisible to customers but involves a little bit of work on your part to integrate the service into your ecommerce web site.

Ecommerce merchant accounts are available from banks and other regulated financial institutions. The problem is that they can be quite onerous in their account opening requirements and take some time to process your application.

With that in mind many people when starting out choose to make use of the ecommerce merchant account services offered by Clickbank or Paypal. It is much easier and quicker to get your ecommerce site up and running with these.

The trade off is that you will find that the banks and other regulated financial institutions will have a cheaper fee structure simply because they are more stringent in their security measures. This is a personal decision you have to make when choosing your ecommerce merchant account provider.

Other issues to look out for when selecting ecommerce merchant account providers:



The range of payment options and whether they include debit cards, charge cards and if required, online checks;
Fee structure – look for hidden charges such as one off fees and abnormal transaction fees and be very clear about the ongoing monthly and transaction charges;
Investigate the set up cost of the special facilities required like swipe machines and programming, as to who pays and how much;
Whether the ecommerce merchant account provider is country specific, for instance a lot of merchants will only deal with applicants resident in the USA.

However, before you commit yourself to any one provider you should investigate the services included in your web hosting package.

If you have purchased an ecommerce web hosting service then you may find that they already include many of the features that an ecommerce merchant account provider will give you.