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Frequently Asked Questions | Sample E-commerce Transaction
How does e-commerce work?
A typical e-commerce transaction occurs as follows:
1) A customer browses through a website looking through the various items or services available to be purchased online.
2) When the customer sees something that they would like to to purchase, they click a button that adds the item to their shopping cart.
3) The shopping cart software keeps track of which items the customer has chosen to buy, and allows the customer to continue shopping through the website.
4) Once the customer is finished shopping, and are ready to purchase the items that they have selected, they click a button that takes them to a checkout.
5) When the customer clicks the button to go to the checkout, the shopping cart software performs all necessary calculations to determine the subtotal, taxes, and shipping expenses to arrive at a total amount for the sale.
6) The customer is taken to a screen displaying the total sale amount, where they enter their credit card information.
7) The customer submits their information, the data is securely encrypted with SSL, and then sent to the merchant bank transaction server where it is decrypted and processed.
8) The bank processes the supplied credit card information and determines whether the transaction was approved or denied. The results are then encrypted and returned to the shopping cart program, usually with a value of either "transaction approved" or "transaction denied".
9) The shopping cart program informs the customer of the results of their transaction.
10) The shopping cart program sends an email notice of the sale to the merchant so that they may fulfill the order, and an email confirmation of the sale to the customer.
11) Money from the sale is deposited into the merchants bank account.
12) Transaction complete!
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