Your ability to establish an effective web presence hinges on the layout, design, accessibility and overall quality of your website. Regardless of whether you can accept credit cards or not, customers will not order your products if your site doesn’t look professional. It is critical that your website look professional and that you direct enough traffic to your site for your products to be seen.

2. Merchant Account

This is an account set up between you and a bank to process credit card transactions through your website. Most traditional banks will not set up merchant accounts for the Internet because they cannot effectively manage the risk.

3. Payment Transaction Software

Software that actually processes customer order information, address, credit card numbers, etc. The data is sent to a credit card authorization network, which verifies that the credit card is valid and verifies that the shipping address matches the billing address. Important features in choosing Transaction Software are fraud prevention and address verification systems.

Link to a special computer, which encrypts confidential ordering data for customer protection. You know you are on a secure server when the URL in your browser says https://. The "s" stands for "secure". If ordering information is not sent via a secure server, it can be intercepted by computer hackers.

5. Shopping Cart

The shopping cart is a critical tool which keeps track of a customer’s order as your website is being browsed. The customer can select certain products from different areas of the website and put them in the shopping cart. Most shopping carts will tabulate the product costs and also calculate shipping and tax.