Manual Debit Processing Techniques

Dan Norris from ecommercewebsitedesign.com.au explains the options for receiving cash manually online. While generally with ecommerce website design, credit cards are processed live via the website, sometimes it's handy to consider some hand-operated processing techniques.

While most sites we build, will support an online fee solution such as PayPal, depending on the store it might still be relevant to look at gaining bills via one of the historical done by hand methods.

This is particularly true when you are dealing with high cost low transaction products as they generally have a bit of fat built into them to make it worth spending the extra time on the manual techniques. Or it might just be that in your particular industry, gaining payments manually is an accepted standard. This could be the case in the bricks and mortar type enterprise that has branched out into online.

Here are the 3 main ways to get fee using a hand-operated technique.

1.    Manually processing credit cards is where the man enters their card number on your site but you don't use a live gateway to process the transaction. Instead you just store the credit card number and you process it manually using a portable point of service machine or another system your amass has provided (such as an online facility). With this option you don't pay for a gateway to process the card as such because you aren't using a gateway but it's a manual process which results in the order being in a state of 'pending' until you process the order manually using your system. If the transaction doesn't work for any reason you would have to take back in contact with the purchaser and deal with it offline. You would also have to make sure you had an SSL installed as you would be gaining the number directly on your site.

2.    Over the telephone credit card would work in the same way as above except instead of the visitor entering their credit card number into your website, they would call you and read it out over the telephone. This requires someone to be on the telephone at the time of ordering. That somebody might receive the number down and process it later or process it live while talking to the customers.

3.    Bank Deposit is where the purchaser manually transfers the cash into your account and you monitor the account to see when the bills go in. When it goes through properly, you discharge the goods.

4.    Cheque or a cash order is where the person sends you a physical cheque and you go to the bank to bank it. This would be the longest fee option as it takes time to delivery the check, for you to bank it at your counting house and for it to be cleared by the amass.

All of the options above require done by hand answer because they aren't processing anything live. They require a site owner to do something before the items can be considered paid for.

There are implications for the work that needs to be done by the store human to make this work but if this is a suitable answer in your industry, you might find some or all of these methods practical.