E-commerce, short for “electronic commerce”, is the selling of products or services over the Internet. E-commerce can be as simple as displaying a product on a Web page and asking visitors to send you money through the mail. Or it can be much more complicated, utilizing shopping carts for order tracking, payment gateways to process credit card payments in real time, SSL to collect sensitive payment information, and customized storefronts that keep track of product inventory. The e-commerce you use will likely fall somewhere in between these two extremes.
Shopping Cart Software
Shopping cart software tracks products that the customer wants to buy. When a customer comes to your online store, the software keeps track of all the products they place in their shopping cart. When the customer wants to check out, the contents of their shopping cart are added to the check out page.
Payment Gateways
Most e-commerce sites use credit cards as the preferred method of payment. How you plan on processing credit card payments will determine whether or not you need SSL with a secure certificate or a payment gateway such as Paypal
Payment gateways provide a link from your Web site to the credit card processing company. If you want to process credit cards in real time from your site, then you’ll need a payment gateway. The gateway take the credit card information and send it to the credit card processor to determine if the sale can be authorized. Once a sale is authorized, the funds from the credit card are deposited into your merchant account.
PCI Compliance
PCI DSS is the global data security standard adopted by the payment card brands for all entities that process, store, or transmit cardholder data. All merchants, regardless of size, that accept payment cards are required to comply with PCI Data Security Standards.
