Ecommerce is simply buying or selling online on your website.

A payment gateway is the technology that, after your customer has initiated a card transaction, securely captures their payment details and transmits them to the relevant parties for authorisation. Essentially, it's the online bridge between your bank and your customer’s bank.

The benefits of selling online can far outweigh the challenges: cross-border selling, access to new customers, greater flexibility and scalability – the opportunities are endless. Before you begin setting up an online store, be sure to have these steps completed.
1. Market research
2. Choose what product(s) to sell
3. Identify your target audience
4. Decide on your ecommerce platform
5. Create your product content (images and copy)
6. Build your online store (shopping carts)
7. Promote and market your online store, e.g. via social media, Google advertising, influencer marketing, email marketing, discounts.

Any business that wants to sell online will need a payment gateway as well as a merchant account – a payment gateway so your business can collect card data, and a merchant account to receive the funds.

Keeping up with security requirements can be tough – and so are the penalties after a data breach. But rest easy. Trust Elavon to protect your customers’ data, as well as your own reputation. We’ll take care of security, so you can concentrate on sales.

Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) can help companies protect cardholder payment account data. PCI DSS compliance is an industry mandate. For that reason, you should consider PCI compliance one of your critical payment system features. The easiest course of action is to find a partner that handles this for you.

There are four levels of business classification that the PCI assigns, based on the number of transactions a business makes.

Level 4: Fewer than 20,000 card transactions per year
Level 3: 20,000-1 million card transactions per year
Level 2: 1-6 million card transactions per year
Level 1: More than 6 million card transactions per year 

Generally, it takes two to four business days for payments to be processed from the customer’s card, through the bank and to your account. Some payment processors, like Elavon, fund you within 48 hours – or you can pay a bit extra to upgrade to same or next-day payments.

Faster Payments is a fast, secure system for transferring sums of money between bank accounts: you'll pay a bit more for this extra-speedy service. Unlike a regular payment, which can take up to three days, Faster Payments sees money paid into your account the next day. With next-day funding, you’ll have cashflow you can depend upon. And with our customer portal Elavon Connect, you can monitor funds anywhere, any time. 

Online payment security is all about guarding your business and protecting your customers’ personal details. With state-of-the-art security tools like tokenisation and 3-D Secure, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be securely selling your wares.

When paying online, sometimes customers get redirected to their bank for extra checks. Those are 3-D Secure checks. 

If your business website doesn’t have a conventional way to buy online, we can provide a web link that sends your customer to a payment page instead.