Start Doing Business Online

Since the onset of the COVID19 (Coronavirus) Pandemic of 2020 a lot of business have started to identify the need to have a strong online sales presence. To assist traditional businesses to pivot to begin selling online the Irish Government enhanced the Online Trading Voucher scheme available through LEO. For a lot of businesses starting out on this path it can be a daunting one, but fear not, here are Three Things You Need to Consider When Building an E-commerce Website.

Payment Gateways/Security

Once your customer has quickly and easily found their chosen item we now need to make it easy for them to complete the purchase. The process involves them adding the item to the cart and then proceeding to the checkout, where they will then pay for the item. Most SME eCommerce websites will use third parties to process their payments, two of the most popular of these being PayPal and Stripe.

To utilise the benefits that these companies provide you must first set up an account with them which involve connecting bank accounts and accepting their terms of service and their costs. I won’t go into detail on these as they are constantly shifting and changing so much so that by the time I would publish about them they might already have changed. I would advise looking into them at great length though and choosing the right payment gateway that suits your needs. A little note here, these are not the only two payment gateways out there, there are many on the market right now, but as with all things, not all of these are created equal. I would advise using extreme due diligence when considering alternatives to the two I mention here, as making the wrong choice on this could end up making this a very costly mistake.

With regards to security, GDPR means that websites owners carry a much bigger burden in respect to how peoples data is handled. Even though you will use a third party payment gateway to process your customers credit card details off site your website itself will still need to be securely encrypted. This means using secure hosting with a strong SSL certificate.  Running SSL turns your website from http to https and effectively ensures that any data collected through the checkout process that is passed to the payment gateway, such as names addresses, email addresses etc. is safely and securely encrypted.