At Harmony Marketing, "E-commerce" means a website that is selling products online. When building your web site you need to ask the following questions:

• Are you going to use a software package like Miva Merchant to handle your shopping/online credit card processing needs or are you developing your own application?
  
• Do you need real time credit card processing?
  
• Do you need to have "secure web pages" in order to accept credit card information from your customers? If so, do you wish to use Harmony Marketing's secure web site, or create your own on your web site?

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Are you going to use a software package like Miva Merchant to handle your shopping/online credit card processing needs or are you developing your own application?

Before you start your ecommerce endeavor, you will want to choose whether you are going to use a vendor built shopping cart system or a custom developed application. Using Miva Merchant, a vendor built tool, gives you many advantages:

• Low development time for your website, quicker to the market
• Support for MANY different processing companies which are fully integrated into the software and require no development
• The ability to customize your shopping cart to fit your website.
• Support from Harmony Marketing and Miva Corporation.
• Upgrades and new functionality available periodically without the need for new development work.

Some of the benefits of a customer developed shopping cart system would be:

• Fully customizable and built to requirements.
• The store can be developed towards the different Payment Gateways Harmony Marketing supports.
• Complete knowledge of your store in case of problems.
  

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Do you need real time credit card processing?

When setting up a website you need to know if you want to process credit cards online, off-line at a terminal, or accept no credit cards at all. Processing credit cards online requires a "Payment Gateway." Harmony Marketing supports many of the payment gateways that are included within the Miva Merchant solution. Most can be accessed outside of Miva as well, using the different programming languages we support (ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl etc.). Payment Gateway companies are services you must subscribe to. They interact with your merchant bank to charge a credit card (authorization) and collect the money to deposit into your bank account (settlement).

The Miva Merchant solutions supports nearly 20 different gateways. Outside of Miva, Harmony Marketing supports U.S. Merchant Services, Verisign PFP, Cybercash, and Authorize.Net. As there are so many other Payment Gateways available, we are unable to know whether we have the tools already available for them to work. However in most cases, we can support your payment gateway. Please contact us if you do not see it listed.

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Do you need to have "secure web pages" in order to accept credit card information from your customers? If so, do you wish to use Harmony Marketing's secure web site, or create your own on your web site?

When taking customers Credit Card numbers, your customers want to be insured this data is being sent securely over the Internet. Technologies like "SSL encryption" are used to encrypt data as it is being sent, so that the information cannot be intercepted and read in transit. SSL encryption requires the use of a "Certificate", which can be thought of as a "key" that "locks" the incoming data, and "unlocks" it when it arrives so the information can be used.

As you may have guessed, there is a cost to obtain these "Certificates". You have two options when hosting with our partner, CrystalTech.

The Harmony Marketing E-Commerce solution, Miva Merchant, supports both methods.

If you have any questions, please contact us. We will be happy to answer any questions you may have.