Credit Card Payments
If you are selling your products and services online then you will usually find that the easiest way to make a success of this is to offer your customers the option to pay via their credit debit cards. Buying something online is perceived as a quick process by many consumers and they may simply choose not to buy from your site if they cannot make an immediate purchase in this way.
There are two primary ways of taking credit payments in this way. For example, you can use:
- An eCommerce store
Here your website will have its own eCommerce store built into it - you can either have this done on a custom made basis by a developer or you can pay an eCommerce site to use a template or already designed store for general use. In order to make this work for you, you will need to have a merchant account with your bank that allows the processing of Internet payments. As an alternative you can have payments made to you via a payment handling service such as PayPal or Nochex, for example.
- An external payment site
If you do not want to build an eCommerce store and simply want people to be able to pay you for goods and/or services then you can also look at linking your site up with PayPal or other payment site such as Nochex. Here, your customers known that they can make secure payments and you don't have to worry about payment processing as your payments (minus appropriate fees) will simply go into your account with the payment provider.
Remember, that security is a big issue here for most people buying online. This isn't an issue with payment sites such as PayPal but, if you are offering your own eCommerce facilities then you need to make sure that you offer your customers solid and reliable security measures to protect their credit card details.