Starting an E-Commerce Website in Trinidad & Tobago, Part 3

In Part One of this series I talked about the options available in Trinidad & Tobago (and everywhere else for that matter) for someone wanting to establish an online business. In Part Two I talked about the current problem as pertains to the absence of local payment processing in TT Dollars (which has been partially solved with the Electronic Transactions Bill 2011 which was passed by the T&T Senate) and the only option to continue to use US based payment processors in the foreseeable future.

Now in Part 3 I’ll discuss how to go about signing up and integrating their payment processor into their website to actually make some money (isn’t that what E-Commerce is about?!) and a few other factors to bear in mind. I’ll also touch on the other creative ways Trinis are using the E-Commerce model for our local market.

Okay, here goes:  you have products to sell online, now what?

1. Choose between a shopping cart service (ongoing fee) or ‘built for E-Commerce’ website (one time cost) [See Part 1]. Remember, building the website to showcase your products to sell is the easy part.
2. Open your business bank account at a Trinidad & Tobago bank as the US based payment processor will need to link it to the account you create with them to deposit the sales proceeds from your online customers when they checkout.
3. Sign up with a US based payment processor, popular ones in Trinidad being 2Checkout, Authorize.Net and the ubiquitous PayPal.
4. Integrate the payment processing account info into the website so that upon checkout their service is activated (done by your webmaster).
5. The processor collects the order payment in US Dollars, regardless if you display your prices in TT Dollars, keeps their processing fee (typically between 3%-5% of the order) then remits the balance to your bank account in Trinidad & Tobago.
6. Even though you use a 3^rd party processor you may still need to offer your customers some visible sense of security that their personal information is safe and your website is secure. This means the presence of a security certificate or SSL like VeriSign, GeoTrust and others.

Do you absolutely need an SSL certificate?

The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol was created to ensure secure transactions between web servers and browsers. The protocol uses a third party, a Certificate Authority (CA), to identify one end or both end of the transactions

As long as you’re using a payment processor, for example PayPal or 2Checkout (which you will be) your website will forward your customer straight to their site to enter their credit card information, so the short answer is no. Your website won’t be touching their credit card details so for this reason you won’t need an SSL Certificate.

However, this does not mean that don’t need one as protecting credit card information (via Data Encryption) is only one function of an SSL Certificate. The other is Authentication and Validation of the business and website which would assure your visitors that your site is secure and their personal information is safe with you. A customer may register on your site and not necessarily make a purchase so only offering security at the checkout stage may not be totally reassuring. But it doesn’t mean that your site poses a risk if they’re just browsing like on any other site.

So that’s Part 3. FYI, the keywords ‘e commerce in Trinidad’ and ‘e commerce in Trinidad & Tobago’ and other variations send a large number of visits daily to my site as both E-Commerce articles Part 1 and Part 2 rank in the first 2 pages of Google T&T. Then I also get many phone calls asking about it which means that Trinis recognize that there is money to be made online. To this I say NOT SO FAST with that perception. Please do not get too excited about the potential. Yes the potential is there but the sad truth is that the majority are not going to make money in my view and it’s not because they don’t have a good idea or good products. But that’s Part 4, sorry!