e-commerce 3rd Party Products

An e-commerce site will require the following third party products;

1‘Shopping Cart’ Software. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we use the proven software package Seber Cart to drive the e-commerce sites we build. Seber Cart makes it easy for you as the website owner to add and manage the products you sell in your website, including product images and descriptions, prices, taxes such as G.S.T. VAT, discounts and freight. Seber Cart even looks after the layout of your product categories for you. Seber Cart will let your customer’s checkout with ease, including support for the major payment gateways. Customers can track their orders via your web site and Seber Cart includes a built-in customer notification system to help you manage your store. The Seber Cart system costs AU$99 per e-commerce website. This is a one-off charge. We will arrange the purchase of your licence for the Shopping Cart System on your behalf. http://www.seber.com.au/downloads/sebercart.aspx.

2A Payments Gateway which is a 3rd party service that automates the charging of the customers credit card and other forms of electronic payment when the customer order is placed. Seber Cart interfaces with a range of Payment Gateway Service Providers, including e-way, the Payment Gateway provider we recommend. The Payment Gateway process verifies and accepts or declines credit card transactions on behalf of you, the merchant, through a secure Internet connection (see SSL below). http://www.eway.com.au/ .  The entry level ‘Start Up’ package from eway currently costs NZ$300 per annum with a transaction fee of $0.40 per transaction.

3A Merchant Account. You will need to apply for a ‘Merchant Account’ with your Trading Bank to be able to accept payments via the ‘Payment Gateway’ (see above). The annual costs for a Merchant Account are around $600, subject to which bank you are with.  When your Merchant Account is approved, your Bank will provide you with a Merchant Number, which we pass onto the Payment Gateway provider, to enable funds for sales to be directly credited into your chosen bank account.

4A ‘SSL Certificate’. SSL is short for the technical term ‘Secure Sockets Layer’. SSL is a special encryption protocol developed to transmit information, such as credit card numbers and other confidential information over the Internet. You can purchase a SSL Certificate (annual cost of approximately NZ$30) from a 3rd party provider such as Trustico or RapidSSL. Your Merchant Account will probably not be approved until you have a SSL Certificate and even if an account was approved, without using the secure SSL encryption, most of your potential customers will simply shop elsewhere. When a SSL Certificate is issued, the address of your website or ‘URL’ as it is often referred to as, starts with https: instead of the usual http: Subject to the ‘Browser’ being used e.g. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome etc. a padlock is displayed at the end of the URL address indicating that the site is secure (see example image below).