Requirements for Accepting Online Payments

Accepting online payments is an easy and simple process if the business have a proper plan and prepare in advanced to meet the requirements needed for operations.

The requirements can be divided into two areas:

1. Business requirements


2. Technological requirements

While both areas are equally important let's look the basics requirements in each area.

Business Requirements

• Corporate Commitment: It's necessary that the business decision-makers involved have a complete picture of their E-Commerce endeavor and provide the resources needed during the analysis, development, launch and maintenance stages of the e-commerce implementation.


• Internet Merchant Account: The merchant account enables the business to perform payment transactions online. It's important to note that the Internet Merchant Account is not the same as a regular merchant account.

Technological Requirements

• Domain Name: The identity of your Website in the form of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
  
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• Website: The website functions as a traditional store but placed on the Internet. Most areas that are important to brick and mortar stores are important to the Internet store as well like presentation, inventory accountability, operations staff, advertising, etc


• Web Hosting: Provides a place for your website to be placed 24/7, all year long to the entire world


• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate: The SSL certificate provides a secure communications channel which is encrypted for safe transactions delivery. Also, it enhances customer security that they are doing business in a safe way.

Web Development Consulting Benefits

Although consulting can be utilized during all stages of any project or endeavor it's in the analysis phases where it mostly has the greatest and positive impact.

Let's picture a typical business scenario:

The administration of a hospital facility is evaluating whether to buy, get an open source solution or develop in-house a web-based Emergency Department patient registration system.

Choosing in any direction will have multiple and different implications than the other alternatives such as time-to-market, resources needed, operational costs, alignment/integration with future implementations of other areas, etc. Now, how can the hospital administration lower the risks associated of making a bad choice for their special case?

The hospital administration could select a consultant agency that preferably have vertical-business knowledge of the Healthcare-Patient operations to guide the administration on what's the best choice, after a careful analysis of the their specific case

With the appropriate consulting the client can save time and resources while incrementing the success rate of the desired endeavor.

Preparing for a Consulting Session

If you are a business that is planning to meet with consultants regarding a project you are developing there are various things that you could do before ensure maximum results.

General Information Sheet: Write on a document about the following aspects:

• Research about the related terms and concepts that will be discussed
• Research how the competitor has solved a similar situation, if possible
  
• Prepare a list of questions to ask the consultants
  
• Define your objectives in a clear and simple way
• Describe why is your business involved in the project
  
• Describe the ideal benefits that should be obtained from a successful solution
  
• Determine a preliminary time-frame of when a solution is desired to be successfully implemented, if possible
  
• Determine a preliminary budget for the project, if feasible
• Set a time-based topic discussion, if the meeting is for 2 hours, how much time you would like to spend on each subject area
  

Meeting Location: Where does the meeting takes place:

• Is the meeting location convenient for all parties, in terms of distance travel, easy to get to, parking slots?
• Does the meeting location provide comfortable accommodations for all guests, enough space, meeting table, chairs?
• Technology resources availability like projectors, internet connectivity and electrical outlets for laptops
  

These points are sometimes overlooked and can create an inadequate perception of your business and/or waste of time for the parties involved.

Secure your Hosting Servers

So you are moving to a new hosting environment and eager to leave everything up and running but leave a tiny security hole open and you may say good bye hosting. Here is a basic list of things to make reduce security risks:

• Is the Administrator password very nasty, very difficult to guess or break?
  
• Firewall enabled and set-up correctly blocking everything, except the necessary services?
• Latest service packs, patches, maintenance release and hot fixes installed?
  
• Clear of suspicious activity in the Event Log like brute force attempts, mysterious policy changes or a successful login from unrecognized workstation?
• Does the MSSQL "sa" account has a super secure password, the nastier the better?
• Email Anti Virus system in place?
• Is the email server consulting with multiple Blacklisting sites to minimize spam?
• Audit failed activity attempts
• If no one uses FTP disable the service

This list can go on forever in detail but you get the idea:

• Unnecessary accounts and/or services should be blocked, disabled or removed
  
• Auditing OS and services logs regularly helps identify problems
• Up to date OS and services lower risk of security breach
  

While this list is not complete by any measure it gives you an idea of some areas that need attention and proper configuration to minimize the chance of a security breach.

XML and Software Quality Certifications from IBM

Most Web professionals know about the well established technology certifications like MCAD, MCTS, SCJP, while not knowing that there are a couple of current and important certifications that almost any Web developer can benefit from.

IBM Certified Solution Developer – XML 1.1 and Related Technologies
Having this certification will prove that you have at least a solid foundation of XML and it’s useful components like Schemas, XSLT, DOM2, SAX2, XPath, XQuery, Namespaces and DTDs

IBM Certified Specialist - Software Quality
This certification is great for any programmer, no matter the platform and programming language they use because the exam is mostly concepts, methodologies and their applications during the development, testing and quality assurance phases.

Having any of the above certifications will surely round your knowledge and make your resume more appealing. As of today each of these certifications costs $200 to take and their passing score is reasonable, the XML exam at 61% and the Software Quality exam at 71% with plenty of time to complete.

IBM has plenty of free electronic resources under Test preparation that will help you in your pursuit.

Good luck in your endeavors.