How To Take Payments On Your Website
By Jeff Colburn, Fri Dec 9th

After my two-part article about selling things on your website,I had several people ask for more details on companiesand shopping carts. So here goes.

If you were to Google for card companies, you'd find outthat there are thousands of places out there. Most of thesecompanies have set up a merchant account for their owncompanies, but added the right to accept payments for othercompanies. So any person with a merchant account, who pays theextra fees to accept other company's payments, can sell theirservices online.

As with anything else, online or offline, be sure you know whoyou are doing business with. Be advised that I have only dealtwith CCNow and PayPal. The other companies I talk about I havenot used myself, but they are popular on the Internet. Stillcheck them out well to be sure they offer the services you need.

Of course, you could always set up your own merchant account,but unless you are doing a lot of sales, I wouldn't suggestgoing this route. When you set up a merchant account you have topay a set-up fee, annual fee and a fee per transaction. Theywill also charge a fee if you want a credit card machine. Youhave to sell a lot of items that are making you a lot of money,to make this profitable. A company may also require you to signup with Verisign to ensure your site's security. If you live inan area with a Sam's Club, I would suggest checking them out.They have the lowest fees of any merchant account company that Ihave been able to find. Costco also has good prices.

When you are looking for a company, you need to checkout several things. ·Do they take credit cards? ·Which creditcards do they take? ·Do they take checks? ·Will they acceptpayments from people in other countries? ·Do they charge aset-up fee? ·What do they charge per transaction? ·Do theycharge a monthly or annual fee? ·Do they require that you sell aminimum amount each month? ·If you don't sell the minimum amountthey require, what fee will they charge you?

Once you know what a company needs to do for you, checkout these companies. ·CCBill http://www.ccbill.com - Among otherthings, they offer E-tickets. This lets members subscribe toyour pay site by issuing usernames and passwords aftersubscribers pay their fee. ·CCNow.com http://www.ccnow.com -Easy to use, they do charge a fee of 9% on the transaction, butyou can only sell products, not services. They also have ashopping cart you can use. ·DebitPayment.comhttp://www.debitpayments.com/pub/home.html - This companyspecializes in helping you with international purchases.·Ibill.com http://www.ibill.com - They have some limitations onwhat you can charge a client. ·Itransact, Inc.http://www.itransact.com/ - They offer check processing for yoursite. If you have a merchant account, you can use it throughthem too. ·Instabill http://www.instabill.com - To use theirservice you have to pay a set-up fee and pay an annual fee.·Merchant workz.com http://www.merchantworkz.com/ - They offermerchant accounts and credit card processing. ·PayPal.comhttp://www.PayPal.com - Very inexpensive and easy to use.·StormPay https://www.stormpay.com/stormpay/index.php - They letpeople make payments via e-mail.

Besides a company you may also need to consider gettinga shopping cart for your site. If you are selling only one itemon



your site, you won't need a shopping cart. But if you're likeme, and selling several items, then you will want a shoppingcart. Without a shopping cart, a person can only buy one item ata time. They would have to complete the entire transaction forone item. Then go back to your site and start all over again forthe next item. It makes it very difficult, which means that youwill lose a lot of sales. With a shopping cart, people canselect as many items as they want and the shopping cart willkeep track of everything. Then when they're ready to pay for allthe items, it's just one simple transaction. Keeping things assimple as possible for the client is one of the keys to successon the Internet.

Here are some companies offering shopping carts. ·1ShoppingCart.com http://www.1shoppingcart.com - They charge a monthlyfee. ·CCNow - See their listing under Companies. ·Mivahttp://www.miva.com - This is a very powerful shopping cart.·PayPal - See their listing under Companies. ·Yahoowww.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant - They offer 3 differentpackages, charge a monthly fee and take a percentage of eachsale. They will also drop ship your orders, so you never have toship anything, Yahoo does it all.

The above companies have the cart on their site and you sendpeople to them during the buying process. You can also downloadshopping cart software onto your server for your visitors touse. Be sure to check with your hosting company to be sure thesoftware you want to download will work on their server. Thefollowing link lists free shopping cart software. However, knowthat you often get what you pay for, and that technical supportmay be poor or nonexistent with this free software. So check outOnline Orders http://www.onlineorders.net/links/Free/ . Theyhave a section on their site that, as of this writing, liststhirty-nine free shopping carts.

Many companies also offer a shopping cart, usually forfree. For example, I use PayPal on my site and they have a freeshopping cart that works in conjunction with their billingservice. The purchase process is easy and I can even change thelook of their shopping cart to be similar to my site.

Some website hosting companies also offer services andshopping carts. You may want to go this route so that everythingfor your website is done through one company. However, if yourhosting company doesn't do a very good job hosting your site, Idon't think you'd want to trust them with your andshopping cart service.

Here are a couple of website hosting companies that offershopping carts and more. ·ValueWeb http://www.valueweb.com/ -They offer shopping cart and credit card processing. ·Westhosthttp://www.Westhost.com - They have the Miva Merchant storefrontand shopping cart software and Payquake for payment processing.

As with most things on the Internet, you have a lot of choices.To make a choice that's right for you, know what you want andconsider the points I've mentioned above. When you have abilling and shopping cart company that meets your needs, andyour client's needs, it will make everyone's life easier andmake you more money.

About the author:http://www.CreativeCauldron.com Jeff Colburn is a websitedesigner and writer. His goal is to make the process of creatingor updating your website easy and simple for you, while creatinga website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff canalso create all of the copy for your website.

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