Quick Guide To Accepting Payments Online
There are many ways of accepting payments online, some are
easier, some more expensive, and some which offer ways to take
online payments, and pay affiliates without tracking them
yourself.
Accepting payments online can be a minefield and as the amount
of online payment processors grows, the choice becomes more
difficult as to which online payment processor to use. Here we
weigh up the pros and cons of 3 of the top online payment
processors.
One of the biggest and most widely accepted ways of accepting
payment online is to use Paypal. Anyone who has used Ebay is
likely to have already come accross Paypal even if they haven't
signed up for an account. Paypal allows the online merchant to
accept instant payments from customers either directly from the
customers Paypal funds or from a credit card. This combined with
its high profile, and use by Ebay makes it a useful payment
processor to the new marketer online.
Paypal also gives you easy ways to create buttons and sales
links to sell your products, and in the case of digital or
downloadable products can be set to send a customer straight to
the download page so your delivery work is done automatically.
The thing to bear in mind is the fees associated with Paypal, as
they take a percentage of every sale paid through them. The fees
can soon add up and knock a hole in your profits.
Another favourite payment processor with online marketers is
ClickBank.com who also accept credit cards on your behalf.
Clickbank is preferred to Paypal by some vendors due to its
built in affiliate program which also has many affiliates
searching for products to sell for commissions.
Clickbank makes it easy to setup an affiliate program and pays
your affiliates for you directly, and can also offer the instant
downloads the same as Paypal. As it already has a huge army of
affiliates and people making search scripts to find products in
the Clickbank marketplace it seems to be the answer to all your
online sales needs, but unfortunately Clickbank have made it
difficult to sell more than one product, so you need another
account each time you want to sell something, or all your
products on one page for affiliates to send their potential
clients to.
Another thing in Clickbanks favour is that they have recently
started allowing payment from Paypal, so that makes the payment
options more varied for your customers, and affiliate customers.
Clickbanks one drawback is that you can only sell digital
products through its system, so if you want to sell physical
products such as books etc. then you need to look elsewhere.
Another option is to use an online credit card processor such as
2 Checkout (AKA 2CO) which offers the user the ability to accept
all kinds of credit cards, and is able to be "plugged into" many
shopping cart scripts for use on websites. Although it offers no
affiliate program itself, 2Checkout doesn't stop you using multi
level affiliate scripts, unlike Paypal, and Clickbank which are
limited in this respect. Where 2Checkout doesn't compare so
favourably is in the fees charged for each transaction, but you
do only pay a one off fee to get an account unlike most credit
card processors which charge fees and a monthly or yearly
membership fee.
These are just some of the choices available to the online
marketer who wants to accept payments online, all have pros and
cons, but you need to look at what you want to do, and choose
one or two of these services to start selling your products
online. Use the one which best fits your business model, and
budget, you can always look at other ways to accept payment
later, but these will get you started.