Cash is king! In the world of online business, however, this golden rule does not hold true. Indeed, you must offer a selection of payment methods customised for your customers. Is your clientele relatively young? If so, they probably do not own credit cards. Do you primarily want to sell to customers in the Netherlands? Then you should offer iDEAL: the most popular Dutch method for online payments. Will you focus on customers in Germany? Boost the conversion rate in your shop considerably by offering payment via bill—though you must be prepared for an increase in non-payments.

Offering the right payment methods can help your online business succeed where others fail. You should therefore carefully analyse the market and choose the system which best meets your needs and those of your customers. Your ePages shop aids you with preconfigured links to a wealth of payment providers. You will find them in the “Settings / Delivery and payment” menu.

Here, you will find payment methods whereby you are responsible for billing customers; methods include payment via bill, cash on delivery, pre-payment and manual credit-card payment. You can simplify matters, though, by having one of many payment providers process your payment transactions—providers include PayPal, Moneybookers and Click&Buy. Once you have registered with them, you can offer numerous payment methods in one go—such as various credit cards or pre-payment via bank transfer. Your customers pay a payment provider, which then notifies you as soon as it receives the money.

Thanks to your shop’s integration, orders which have been paid for will be marked automatically in your back office. You then simply have to ship the order.
To link your shop, you must register it with a payment provider. The registration process varies little among providers and always follows the same general pattern. Using the provider Moneybookers as an example, we will show you how to set up payments.

In the “Settings / Delivery and payment” menu, add the payment provider Moneybookers. After you save, click on “Complete”. If a corresponding entry is already in the overview list, you can begin registering.

For every payment provider, your ePages shop provides you an appropriate link to register a corresponding merchant’s account. After you register, you will receive different registration data from different providers. Registration data might consist of a customer ID and a password; other providers use a combination of password and e-mail address. Regardless of the specifics, you must enter such data in your shop’s back office.

Here are four pieces of advice for a smooth set-up:

• In your merchant back office, make sure that you correctly enter all registration data for your payment provider. Sometimes, a payment provider’s string of data is longer than the visible output field. In this instance, double-check that you have indeed transferred all data with all parameters.
• Due to case sensitivity, make sure you use upper-case letters and lower-case letters as appropriate.
• Make sure that you do not confuse the “User name” and “Password” login fields.
• Check your merchant’s account with the payment provider to verify that the payment method you had selected in your shop has, in fact, been activated.

Once you have correctly entered all of your payment provider’s data, it is time to test the payment process. Nearly all payment providers offer a test mode, also known as the “sandbox”. This permits the consequence-free processing of transactions. If there is no test mode, you should make an actual purchase in your shop to ensure that you will indeed receive payments. To conduct a live test, your ePages online shop must be “open” and the payment method must be set to visible. Activate the payment method under “General settings”. To switch your shop to live mode, click on the "Settings” menu and select “General settings”. Under the “Status” tab, you will see the “Status” submenu item. You can activate your shop here. But keep in mind that anybody can now access your shop!