Shopping Cart Payment Processing.
Processing Shopping Cart Payments.
E-commerce today is typically implemented using shopping cart software. Shopping Cart software allows a business to present an electronic catalog of items for sale. People shopping the site can fill a virtual shopping cart with desired items and once they are finished shopping, checkout with taxes, shipping and handling all calculated offering a total to be paid. Payments are handled by a payment processing gateway and the shopper returns to the shopping cart software.
Today shopping cart software has expanded to booking engines in the case of travel where dates and offers can be chosen rather than speaking to a rental agent. Beyond shopping carts and booking engine are various vertical solutions to sell specific products with sizes, colors and much more. These solutions are tailored to the products and business lines to work within industry standards.
Custom solutions to sell very specific items are also being created, stretching the bounds of what a shopping cart is. In the end, the job of e-commerce software is to facilitate the sale of the items in a manner that is secure and user friendly. Further, click and mortar sales are being achieved allowing shoppers to shop online and optionally make payment online or in the store upon pickup.
Regardless of how a total is summed up, the payment gateway really only works on the total. In special circumstances, such as subscriptions, installment payments, and recurring payments, the total might be handled differently, but the payment gateway cares only about the total of the shopping cart. This total gets handed off to the payment gateway to process the payment, using credit cards or a gift card or loyalty rewards.
Widely used shopping carts are those such as Magento, WooCommerce (for WordPress sites), Zen Cart and Open Cart just to name a few. Many of these shopping carts are open source meaning they can be had for free or at least the code can be altered to fit an exact situation. These solutions integrate a database of items offered for sale along with all the details that pertain to that order. They are in fact ‘Web Applications’ in their own right.
Mobile applications are now facilitating payments for in app purchases. Some will sell you items used for game playing, others offer the application itself by unlocking various features that are hidden from non paying users. Bridging these two worlds is Point-of-Sale systems.
Mobile point of sale is an emerging trend in e-commerce. Using an app on a tablet, phone, laptop or PC a sales force can be fully mobile. Using a mobile point of sale (MPOS) solution extends the reach of a business to a global audience. Sales can be negotiated and payment accepted from anywhere in the world. Although technically not a shopping cart the features and benefits are similar but meant to extend an internal sales force to a point of presence.
As these situations have evolved, a new payment processing platform has been created to accommodate them all. This new processor platform is known as omni-commerce or omni-channel processing. This allows a business to have a single merchant account to process all payments over the phone, face to face and online. Having all these integrated into a single account greatly simplifies reconciliation and bookkeeping. With a single gateway you can connect software platforms, terminals, and even inventory control solutions in a centralized manner. These gateways even account for other payment methods like cash and checks.
- National Transaction Corporation
- February 19, 2023 | 2023-02-19