Paying with credit cards is one of the safest ways to complete an online transaction. Now that you've set up a WooCommerce store, you'll want to accommodate a wide variety of customers. Some of your customers may not use PayPal, Stripe, or one of the other convenient payment applications that come with WooCommerce. But you can be fairly sure that most of your customers will have credit cards. In this article, we're going to show you how you can safely and securely accept credit card payments in WooCommerce with Authorize.net.
Why Use Authorize.net?
When you use Authorize.net to process credit card payments, you are allowing the transaction to happen off of your server and on Authorize.net's secure payment platform. This also means the responsibility of processing sensitive data is taken off of your hands and passed off onto a third party.
All you need to do is make sure that your site is using SSL to secure the initial form submission.
How to Accept Credit Card Payments with the Authorize.net Plugin
In order to accept credit card transactions, you will need an account with Authorize.net. Once you've set up an account, all you need to do is install the Authorize.net WordPress plugin:
- Log into WordPress Dashboard
- Select Add New under Plugin from the left side panel
- Use the Plugin Search to find Authorize.net Payment Gateway For WooCommerce
- Install and activate the plugin
- Select Settings under WooCommerce
- Click the Payments tab at the top
- Enable Authorize.net AIM
- Click Manage for Authorize.net AIM
- Enable the payment module
- Fill in your Login ID and Transaction Key (available only from within your Authorize.net account)
- Click Save Changes
Now, your WooCommerce site is ready to accept secure payments via credit card transaction. Remember, the credit card is being processed on Authorize.net's secure servers. This means they are responsible for receipt of the credit card information, but you still are responsible for protecting any other customer data you may want to retain for record-keeping or marketing purposes. Be sure to inform your customers in your privacy policy of how you retain data and for what purpose.