Credit Cards
SSL may seem difficult to setup, but it’s really quite easy. Don’t fall for companies that charges lots of money to setup SSL. You will need a few things to setup SSL:
- An SSL certificate. SSL certificates do not need to be that expensive. The cheap $10/year ones are just fine, and offer the same level of encryption as even the $699/year ones do. If you pay lots of money, you are just paying for the name brand appeal of having say a “Verisign” branded SSL certificate.
- A CSR or Certificate Signing Request generated from your web host. If you are hosting with us, you can go to your cpanel > ssl/tls manager to generate your CSR. Then you can copy and paste it to the place where you buy your SSL. if the SSL place asks for server type, choose cpanel from the drop down choices, or Apache if cpanel is not available as an option.
Where can you get SSL certificates? Our personal favorite is http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates.aspx the Comodo and Geotrust $9 – $10 a year ones are fine.
To accept credit cards online you will need a Merchant Account and a Internet Payment Gateway.
A Merchant Account is basically the same thing as a bank account, except usually it is a temporary storage of your funds until it is deposited into your normal bank account.
An Internet Payment Gateway is the place that does the online transaction. They will verify the credit card of your client, make sure it has funds, and usually do a quick fraud check.
We recommend using Stripe which doesn’t charge any monthly fees or hidden charges and their service combines both the Merchant Account and Internet Payment Gateway. Their rates are very competitive and clearly listed on their website. If you want to use Authorize.net We offer merchant accounts and internet payment gateway accounts via our partner Merchant Focus.
