In this era of modern technology, it has become all the more common for people to simple pull out those trusty mobiles from their pockets and make an order for any sort of product they take a liking to.
Online payment has become a common practice in most centers of shopping, the popular one being online retailers.
Amazon especially thrives over this practice, with its economic ecommerce model making it one of the biggest supplier of products worldwide, from imported to local. You get everything. While most of this is straightforward for someone who is simply a customer, this in practice is rather complicated. You may often be confused by the term “Ecommerce” and may wonder what that is in an exact sense. This article will explain ecommerce in as simple a way as possible.
Ecommerce, what is it?
Ecommerce is essentially the practice of buying and selling something online, hence “ecommerce”. It could be for any sort of purposes, for the transfer of goods and service between various companies, or for simply for what ecommerce is most widely known for, buying online products from online retailers. It would be a mistake to think that ecommerce refers simply to making transactions online, that is not true.
Ecommerce in a broad sense can refer to anything that involves a commercial transaction online, it could be someone selling their personal item on Ebay. It could be someone offering their services in exchange for payment.
In simple terms, any service that involves a transaction of money could be considered an ecommerce merchant service. Any sort of ecommerce merchant services can involve a rather complicated fundamentals of procedure, for something like an online retailer such as “Amazon”.
Starting a business can involve a complicated set up such as finding a good credit card processing service(merchant service or retail merchant service) for your business to be able to send and receive transactions and be able to make your own invoice to send to the customer.
Most retail merchant services offer various benefits aside from being able to make transactions, such as POS(Point-of-Sale) machines for making in-person transactions which is mostly beneficial for places such as a restaurant.
It could also include a physical shopping center or any type of brick and mortar services since POS machines normally include a cash register, a computer and a card swiping machine.
Now, there can also be another type of service reserved for more risk taking companies called “High Risk Merchant Services”.
These types of services are normally used for businesses that presents a higher risk of fraud to the credit card processing service, this is mostly applicable to sites that focus on the sales of products such as E-Cigarette both online and offline or for online gambling sites.
It is of course much harder to find a high risk merchant as most well-known credit card processing services are unwilling to take on businesses that they consider to be high risk.
The main problems of taking up a high risk merchant most often involves both a higher processing fee along with account fees and it will be a certainty that you will have to sign up a long term contract owing to the fact that you were able to even get a high risk merchant to take you up.
Some of the well-known retail merchant services such as “Square” are mainly reserved for non-high risk businesses. And that too for a good reason since they offer some of the best low cost subscription fees and are less likely to cause any sort of problem related to transactions.
If you are doing a high risk business, you will have to search for alternatives.
Some high risk merchant services can actually offer reasonable processing fees such as “PaymentCloud”, it will of course depend on just how risky your business is as price quotes are given according to what kind of business you are starting.
Although from some testimonies, PaymentCloud has been good enough for high risk businesses.
Ecommerce in its entirety is still a term that is growing up more each coming day, it is not just something that can be relegated to a few online stores.
Ecommerce as has been said before, is applicable for any sort of work that requires online transaction, it could be trading or even marketing.
Credit cards especially have become a popular commodity for making those kinds of transactions.
Although ecommerce business can include payment in cash if you are ordering something online, as long as you are doing your work that involves through what is considered an infrastructure of the internet, you are doing an ecommerce business.
And so, even if the meaning of ecommerce is still a bit up in the air as of the current matters of the world. It is an undeniable fact that ecommerce is globally taking over the world as one of the most popular trends.
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