Accepting payments is a must for any online business.  Potential customers expect to see this way of paying on all websites.  The reason why this is the preferred method is simply the speed that it can be done.  Customers don’t want to be sending cheques- they would rather just go somewhere else where online payments are accepted.

photo credit: sovietmole

Credit Cards

For a website to accept only credit cards, the owner is going to have to have an Internet Merchant Account or IMA.  This sounds like a bank account but is different in the fact that it is only for processing credit cards but then the money needs to be transferred to your real checking account.

TransFS.com is a great website to find an Internet Merchant Account provider.  The only problem with these kinds of accounts is that it takes about 4 weeks to actually get the account.  Once the merchant account has been received, the next step is to find a payment gateway in order for the transactions to work.  Basically the merchant account stores the money but needs a gateway to transfer the money in to the merchant account.  There are fees for using merchant accounts which is why this kind of method is better suited to bigger online companies.  For smaller businesses PayPal is a safer option.

PayPal

PayPal is now becoming one of the most popular payment gateways online.  Payments made through PayPal are very secure and no longer do payments just have to be made from account to account but with a business PayPal account you can now start receiving money from credit and debit cards too.  All that is needed is to add a PayPal button to the website, customers make their order and the money gets sent straight in to the owners’ account.

Google Checkout

Everybody knows and trust Google.  They now have their very own payment method called Google Checkout.  The service itself is very secure and reliable which makes this a top choice for many e-commerce websites.  Another thing that makes this a favourite is that they typically charge less merchant fees than PayPal.

IKobo

IKobo.com is a newer service yet a very good one too.  New users to IKobo get to choose a payment source which they can then tie up with their account.  They get sent a VISA card in which any time the customer makes a purchase, all they need to do is type in the card number and IKobo takes care of the rest.

Security

When taking payments online there is a big risk in the fact that there is a lot of credit card fraud going on.  For this reason it is very important that before setting up the website to accept online payments, the website is made secure from the start.  This may mean spending a little bit of money in order for a security specialist to sort the website out for you.

This is not just people’s money that is at risk but also your reputation.