Accepting electronic payments is essential to an EBusiness. The UK is Europe's largest ECommerce economy with 27.7 million UK having shopped online- and it is growing fast.

For many smaller businesses setting up shop online and finding the best way to accept payments is a confusing and frustrating task. How can you join in by accepting payments online? What do you have to do?

Online payment systems can be challenging to implement and understand, but overcoming the 'barrier to entry'; created by this can give you a competitive edge. There are three major ways to accept online payments:

Separate services

Shops accept cash, schedules, credit and debit cards using the traditional 'swipe' systems. Internet procedures are very similar; however, there are added steps to provide secure transactions.

To trade online you need a merchant account and payment gateway. Internet merchants need a "card not present merchant account." The card not present merchant account allows you to accept and hold payments from credit card transactions.

Most high street banks in the UK offer internet merchant accounts, but they can be 'selective', preferring businesses to have a record of at least two years trading. Even so, it can take up to 8 weeks to gain bank 'approval'. Lloyds Cardnet and EPDQ are examples of merchant account providers.

Research show that typical rates are:

• Setup Fee: £200

• Monthly fee: £10

• Debit: £0.35 per transaction

• Amex / Diners: 3.0%

• MasterCard / Visa: 2.5%

• Bond: £1,000

A payment gateway is a separate service that acts an intermediary between your shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customer's credit card issuer and your merchant account. Some merchant account providers also offer payment gateway solutions as part of an overall package, so it can pay to do your research. Examples of payment gateways are Protx and SECPay. Charges vary; Protx charges a set up fee and a monthly charge of £20 for up to 1,000 transactions per quarter thereafter customers pay £0.10 per transaction. SECPay offers a fixed rate or percentage tariff.

Bureau service

A payment bureau like Worldpay or Netbanx is a one-stop solution collecting and processing card details on behalf of the business without requiring an internet merchant account with an or a separate payment gateway. This makes bureau services a popular choice for SMEs first steps into ECommerce.

There are advantages in bureaux as they will accept most types of business and their track record will not usually be an issue, but there are also disadvantages as there are set up charges, funds can be held for 30 - 60 days and transaction charges are generally higher at 4 - 8%.

Third party service

PayPal is the best known. It is an account-based system that lets anyone with an EMail address securely send and receive online payments using their credit card or bank account. It is a cheap way for merchants to accept credit cards online instead of using a traditional payment gateway. PayPal has 63.8 million member accounts.

However, PayPal is not a bank and does not provide a merchant account but a PayPal account, which PayPal fully controls. There has been some debate about this as merchants can find themselves on the wrong end of a frozen PayPal account without the ‘normal’ protection enjoyed when working with a bank.

PayPal charges based on each month's transactions.

Rates for payments received in £ Sterling (July 2006) are:

• £0-£1,500 3.9%+20p
• £1,500.01-£6,000 3.4%+20p
• £6,000.01-£15,000 3.2%+20p
• £15,000.01-£55,000 2.9%+20p
• Over £55,000 2.4%+

Google Checkout has just been launched. To use it you first of all have to have a Google Account. Then you can open a Google Checkout account too. Presently the service is restricted to the USA, if you are a merchant but soon... Of course, you can use it for payments.

Naturally Google, being just about 'everyone's favourite' will push this hard and undoubtedly make headway - but at the moment they need about 64 million accounts to catch up with PayPal.

WEB SITE ANALYSIS 102

You can download a PDF version of this essay here. See Web Site Analysis 101 here

Last month we published Website Analysis 101 and said we would return to the subject. So I guess this is Website Analysis 102?

As we said in 101 eliminating guesswork and measuring success is what analysing your website visitors' behaviour [or web analytics] is all about.

Understanding where they came from, where they land and what people are doing on your site. Having a great looking website with excellent search engine visibility is not going to take your business to the next level unless you have the proper web site measurement tools in place to know whether you are driving sales.

So, have you ever asked yourself, or have others ever asked you, questions like those below, and others? If you have, did you know how to answer them or what the answers are? If not, shouldn't you be able to? If the answer to that is no, why have you got a website?

• How do I increase revenue from my site?

• Can I increase the number of leads generated on my site?

• How do I optimize keywords for my site?

• Can I decrease my web based customer acquisition cost?

• How do I decrease my online support costs?

• Does "Free Delivery" or a "BOGOF" for web sales increase my margin?

Web analytics provides the foundation for effective online business and marketing decisions about these sorts of question through accurate measurement and analysis of visitors’ actual behaviours.

Overall, there are probably four site types.

• Content: Content sites revolve around advertising, with the goal of repeat visits and thus increased advertising exposure. Analytics is about click tracking the ads by content pages.

• Customer Support: It is about self-service model and giving customers the answers they need to reduce call centre or other costs. Analytics is about click tracking the FAQs etc. and marrying the information with other company information to establish what can and cannot be answered effectively this way.

• Lead Generation: Here your goal is to get visitors to submit their contact information so that they can be contacted. Analytics is focused on lead capture to help understand how to increase lead conversion.

• ECommerce: The goal is to get customers to fill their shopping cart and buy. Analytics is about purchases and looking at how the customer reached the point of purchase.

Which type of site is yours?

Not only that what is it you want people to do when they get to your site?

What is the 'target action' for your site?

This is what you need to measure.

Once you have decided that you can move on to the next stage and measure what matters. Then you have to decide how to measure what matters and how to interpret it once you have measured it.

How to measure is to find a good package such as Click Tracks or Google Analytics. Then you need to add the page tags to all pages and gather page-level data for at least 6 to 12 months. You need plenty of data because visitor onsite times are often very short and you do not want or need erroneous results. When you interpret the information, all those pretty pie charts and graphs, make sure you know what else was going on in the timeframe. Your own events such as ad campaigns and PR can influence site traffic, as can world events such as 9/11 so you need to put site traffic into context for the period you are analyzing.

You can download a PDF version of this article here.