Since my last two posts I have been writing about the different things we should take into account when we open an online store. Thereby I have written of the importance of marketing in order to be visible to our potential customers including SEM, SEO and marketing on social networks and also about the importance of enabling customer service to answer our client’s requests. In this post I will address other subject that is essential for online stores: payments.
In order to get our payments we have many options we can enable in our online store. The first option I will mention is payment on delivery. Therefore once the buyers select the products they want to purchase, this product will be sent and once he receives it he will pay it to the person that is delivering it. The disadvantage of this payment method is that we must be sure that the product will arrive when the buyer is on the address he gave us, because he will have to pay for his purchase.
Other option we can enable in our online store is bank deposits. Thereby once the buyer requests for a product he must deposit in the sellers bank account the amount of the transaction. After this has been done the product is sent to the buyer. If what he is buying is a service this will be enabled once he pays.
The last option I will mention in this post is the use of a payment gateway. Having a payment gateway in our online store is as if we had a credit card terminal in our physical store. Therefor the buyer will be able to buy in the store with a debit or credit card without having to worry that the seller is going to have sensitive data about him such as his card number, because this information will travel encrypted. Even though this is the easiest way to have transactions between buyers and sellers, there are a lot of clients that are afraid to use this method. The reason for this to happen is the union of two factors: ignorance of the procedure and frauds that still happen today with this payment method.
Having explained the different methods that exist today, you as a seller must decide which ones are you going to enable on your store. My advice for you is to enable the ones that the buyer is willing to use. For example if you are going to sell to young people that are native to the internet, maybe the best way is a payment gateway because they trust this method. But if you are going to sell to older people with a low socioeconomic level maybe you are going to have to enable the other two options because it is likely that many of them don’t have a credit card.
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