Setting Up an Ecommerce Business

In order to setup an ecommerce business, you need an Internet merchant account, a payment gateway, a shopping cart, and a website.

An Internet merchant account is a financial relationship between you and a credit card processor, so funds can be deposited into your bank account. It differs from a regular merchant account in that an internet merchant account is approved to run web initiated transactions over the Internet, while a regular account is not approved for web transactions. Usually it involves a website with real time credit card processing. At Merchant Accounts Express, we provide you with free setup of an Internet merchant account.

A payment gateway is a remotely hosted software application that transmits transaction data (either from your website or from a virtual terminal where you manually enter or key in transactions) to a credit card processor. Our payment gateway of choice is Authorize.Net as it is pre-integrated with most shopping carts, has the most features, includes a free virtual terminal for manual entry, and is the easiest to use. At Merchant Accounts Express, we provide you with free setup of the Authorize.Net payment gateway.

If you only sell one item, or one service, or just a few items, chances are you do not need a shopping cart. However, most ecommerce businesses require some sort of shopping cart on their website. This is especially true the more items you have. A shopping cart allows website visitors to pick and choose the items they wish to purchase. The shopping cart then collects the customers address, and adds tax and shipping as needed. Finally the shopping cart connects to a payment gateway for processing of the credit card order.

If you already have a shopping cart, check out the list of compatible shopping carts to make sure it is compatible with our Authorize.Net payment gateway.

At Merchant Accounts Express, we provide all our clients with the XpresssCart Free Shopping Cart, which has no startup or monthly fees, and is fully compatible with the Authorize.Net payment gateway. Xpresscart was developed in house just for Merchant Accounts Express clients. It has many features and is extremely easy to use. However XpressCart is unique in that it is 100% search engine friendly. That is, it develops pages of your products that are optimized for search engines, so that search engines can index and find your products. This means more people will find your products when you use XpressCart, as your products are more likely to appear in natural organic search engine results.

Most every other shopping cart out there, except for a few high priced carts, are not search engine friendly, and as a result your products are not indexed by search engines. With XpressCart you not only get a great shopping cart, but one that is search engine friendly, all for free.

At Merchant Accounts Express, we have a turnkey website builder that is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get a website up and running. If you don't already have a hosting company or a web designer, we encourage you to check out Site Builder Express, our turnkey website builder product where you can design your business site online in under 30 minutes. Choose from over 500 designs or create your own. No html skills or programming skills are needed, and it comes with a free shopping cart that is pre-integrated with the Authorize.Net payment gateway.

However, if you already have a web hosting company, or a web designer, you may be better off using them. There are many great web hosting companies out there and many great web designers. If you go this route, choose a hosting company that has been around a while, has a large client base, and has the features you are looking for. Some may even offer a free shopping cart, although it is often a basic cart with limited features (of course you can always use our free XpressCart shopping cart). Once you have chosen a hosting company, you can either design the website yourself using a web design program such as Microsfot Frontpage or Dreamweaver, or you can hire a professional web designer. A professional web designer can be more expensive, but usually results in a better looking site, and allows you to customize the site exactly the way you want it.