Starting an ecommerce website is one of the best ways for a business to grow its client base and improve its bottom line. Online shopping is convenient for customers and can improve merchants' revenue streams and cash flow in several ways.

With an embedded payment model, online purchases can be made from any location at any time, meaning sales aren’t limited to business hours and your customer base instantly expands across the country (or beyond).

Since digital payments are automatically recorded, record-keeping is built into your online payment software making it easy to review sales reports.

When customers make payments online, businesses can automatically collect data that can be used for targeted promotions in the future, increasing repeat business.

When customers shop at the online version of your store, there is no need to stand in line, and they can see the running total of their order throughout the shopping process.

With products like North’s Invoicing API, businesses can set up a branded portal where customers can pay invoices. Merchants can even schedule invoices to be sent at a later date so merchants can “set it and forget it.”

Offering different types of payment options, such as subscriptions to products and services, is a great way to increase customer loyalty. These autopay products work by saving a secure, tokenized version of the customer's card data on file. The buyer agrees for a specified amount of money to be withdrawn from their bank account on a fixed day of each week or month for a predetermined length of time (or indefinitely until they cancel the subscription). Schedule recurring payments can increase repeat business, and your bottom line.

While the thought of experiencing a data breach may be enough to make merchants think twice before starting an online shop, digital payments today are more secure than ever, and that security is only increasing. Payment service providers are required to follow Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), which are designed to provide the utmost security for businesses and customers alike. Technologies such as SSL, certified end-to-end encryption, and tokenization are now common practices for keeping data safe.

Payment products such as hosted pay pages or hosted payment forms place most or all of the burden of PCI compliance on the payment service provider, leaving merchants with more time to concentrate on their business. Since merchants aren’t able to physically inspect the customer’s credit card during online transactions, ecommerce stores are more susceptible to fraud. In response, many payment service providers now offer built-in fraud prevention technologies, such as chargeback and active fraud monitoring. What’s more, protocols such as Address Verification Service (AVS) and 3-D Secure can be leveraged to make payments safer for businesses of all sizes.

Most businesses accept online payments by adding a shopping cart feature and checkout page to their website. When competing against a multitude of other ecommerce stores, making the browsing and payment processes secure and frictionless is key. Fortunately, you can rely on your payment service provider to offer the guidance and technologies that will make this possible and help reduce instances of shopping cart abandonment. For most businesses, accepting payments online requires at least the following.

• A website where customers can browse goods and services and add items to a shopping cart associated with their user account.
• A secure payment integration where the customer can securely enter their payment information and other details. (Payment service providers should encrypt this data before sending it to the cardbrand networks and the customer’s financial institution for approval.)
• A merchant processing account where the funds from your online payments are deposited.

Getting an ecommerce site up and running doesn’t have to be complicated — there are a variety of low-code or no-code products available for businesses that just need a simple payment solution. Businesses that use a WordPress website can easily add payments without coding anything thanks to North’s WooCommerce Plugin, and those that host their own site can design a simple hosted checkout page that’s completely managed by the payment processor. For those with a BigCommerce store, just update a few settings to add a checkout page that keeps customers on your site instead of routing them to a third-party payment page.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can embed payments into their software products to improve user experience and increase revenue. Embedding payments using an existing software stack can keep customers on a single application, which allows software companies to develop a seamless product and offer customers a cohesive set of services, including purchasing products or services. Additionally, embedding payments into software allows ISVs to add a new revenue stream by collecting referral fees paid on every transaction made on their software.