 As any retail operation, online or offline, you
want to get paid. Miva Merchant comes with a multitude of payment options.
Undoubtedly, credit cards are the most important since most people want the convenience
and the protection credit cards offer. Merchant comes with many credit card modules
that will work with various third party real-time processing gateways. The details
of setting up each module will depend on the third party gateway and we will not go into
its details since the setup instructions should be provided to you by the gateway.
| You have to first click on the checkbox next to the
payment options you want to offer your customers then click update. When you do so
you will see that your choices have now hyperlinks created in the top bar. We will
start with "Credit Card Payment With Simple Validation". |
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Step 1
Click on the "Credit Card Payment With Simple
Validation" tab. The screen will show you the credit cards pre-configured in
Merchant. As you can see, they are ordered alphabetically.
This is a standard feature in Merchant, all options under
the same "module" will be in alphabetical order. If you want to have Visa
show first and AMEX last, you can number the choices where Visa will become 1-Visa and
American Express will become 4-American Express and the other two will be numbered as you
want them to appear. Another way is to put a a character that comes before the
alphabet ahead of the choice you want first, for example the period. So if you just
want Visa to show up first, edit the text to be ".Visa" instead of
"Visa"...Cool huh. To edit any of the options, click on the white
edit button to the right of the given option and change the text to whatever you
want. Leave the prefixes and lengths as they are unless you have reasons to believe
that they need to be edited. You can also add other kinds of credit card if the
country you operate in has those cards.
One more thing to remind you here: the checkboxes next to
the credit card options are NOT to assign them but to REMOVE them. This will be
useful if you do not want to accept less pervasive cards like AMEX or Discover.
Again we remind you that Miva Merchant is nasty as it removes/deletes without asking you
to confirm. In your haste you may very well click on a checkbox and update thinking
that you are "adding" or "assigning" but end up deleting.
Step 2
If you plan to accept checks, you can simply click on the
checkbox and update. You will NOT get a tab on the top to edit anything since there
is nothing really to edit. By selecting the Check Payment option, you customer will
see this selection in the payment selection screen. If he selcts it he will get an
box in the following screen (similar to the box for the credit card number) asking for a
check number. The customer can, of course, just put any number - but this step may
make the customer pull out his check book to get the number. This may make him a little
more committed and he may very well even write out the check and mail it that day... good
luck ;-).
Step 3
Some people may want to use the Cash On Delivery (COD)
feature, and that can be added just like all the other modules. You can then click
on the tab and enter an amount you would like to charge for offering the rather less
common COD. You can enter a message that will display on the "Payment
Information" screen if COD was selected in the previous checkout screen. This
payment method should be used with extreme caution since there is a lot of expense
involved in it without any assurance that the product will be accepted when the customer
finds it at his doorstep. We do not think that this is an option that should be
offered to online shoppers unless all your customers are house accounts.
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