For many companies, one of the main purposes of their website is to conduct business transactions with their customers. From the customer perspective, they want to know their private financial information is secure when they share it with a business. From the perspective of a business, they want a reliable, timely source of revenue from their payment streams and they want to uphold the trust their customers have placed with them.

Individual companies could contract a company to build their own payment method system into their website. However, this is costly and redundant. Payment integration companies have made it their sole business to create and maintain software components that will safely and securely process financial transactions between small to medium size businesses and their customers.

Authorize.net is a popular payment gateway that allows businesses to securely receive credit card information from their customers and transfer that information to the payment processor. In order to utilize a payment gateway, businesses will enter into a business arrangement, or merchant account, with a credit card processor that will handle their credit card transactions. PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon Payments are also popular payment methods for merchants to provide to their customers for secure transactions. ACH payments are another type of online payment system that allows customers to pay make payments directly from their bank savings or checking account. ACH payments are often used to set up payments for regular monthly expenses like utilities, garbage service or internet service provider fees.

When evaluating the different types of payment methods available, businesses should consider the fees charged by various processors. Some processors will charge a per-transaction fee, whereas other will charge on a month-to-month basis or some other fixed period. Some companies may conduct all their transactions online. Others may also need point-of-sale equipment to process storefront transactions. Some companies will want to have several relationships with payment processors in order to offer their customers flexibility in payment.

Here at Folio1, we can analyze your business and suggest the best solution to maximize payment functionality while keeping your costs low. For more information on how to seamlessly incorporate payment integration into your website, please contact us.