Ecommerce is doing business online, the buying and selling of services and products over the web. It allows you to promote your goods or services, advertise promos, and tap into your sales targets in an easier way. Your clients will make their orders by browsing on your web site and send their payments through your merchant account, which in turn, transfers these payments to your bank account.

Thus, a permanent connection of your web site to the Internet is a basic requirement. This is what web hosting merchant accounts offer. They provide this complete and continuous link by allowing your site to occupy a space on their own web server, where all the information about your site is stored. Being connected to this server will enable you to acquire the all-time web accessibility, for it stays on for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

These web hosting merchant accounts will save you the cost of owning and maintaining the needed server. You just have to pay for their service. In looking for a web host, you need to consider their reliability and reputation history, the disk or storage space of their web server, and its capability of accommodating simultaneous access to your web site. Make sure there is a database server and scripting software, operating and web content management systems, and web interface.

And most significantly, make sure your web host offers payment processing capabilities such as SSL or Secure Sockets Layer, a communications protocol that provides security. This is very important since there are sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, that need to be encrypted to ensure that the information passes securely between you and your client, so as to prevent opportunity for fraud.

A web hosting ecommerce merchant account offers you the ability to accept all modes of payment in a faster, safer and more accessible means. It ensures you that all your payment transactions can be continuously processed anytime, may it be day or night, and that no piece of information in the communication and payment transaction process will be missed since your web site is online all the time.