e-Commerce:
3rd Party Credit
Card Processing

Once you've got your catalog set up with a simple shopping cart script, you're ready to take the next step in e-commerce: actually taking the money!

Your shopping cart script, running on The World Kiosk, represents your catalog, and you control the content and style of it. Actually taking the order and putting through the transaction securely is an entirely different level of involvement, and there are a number of companies large and small who specialize in just this part of the job. This model amounts to outsourcing the credit card processing part of the job, which I think has great value even after The World Kiosk begins to offer secure server.

Like everything in this business, the price spread is significant, with some people promising to do the big hard job for just pennies a day to other deals involving a 20% cut and a two-year commitment. Overall, from the conversations I've had, I'd say everything is negotiable.

ICOMS
www.icoms.com
These folks in Nashua NH were among the first to offer third- party processing, and they do it at quite a high level for national ISPs and large e-commerce solutions.

NetSales
www.netsales.net
This group out of Kansas is very aggressive in selling to small retailers who want to get on the web and don't have an existing catalog ordering system in place. The start-up fee is under $500, and the fees for taking the credit card on their account is 15% plus 2.something% of the actual credit card fee, which you would pay anyway.

Total Merchant Manager
www.tmmpro.com
Very simple and direct connection to a secure order form. From there, you can put through the credit card charge, or send yourself a purchase order and put through the charge back at the shop. Located near Hartford CT.

Again, the model here is that you can build a neat and trim shopping cart on The World Kiosk and take the ordering function right up to the last two fields on the order form: CC# and EXP date. Then the script bundles up the order and takes it to the commerce server off-site for completion. You collect eveything on The World Kiosk short of the CC#.

Call The World Kiosk anytime at 617-739-0202 to discuss, or send email to kiosk@world.com and we'll contact you.