Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Accepting Credit Card Payments Online

By Justin Harrison

Customers who use the internet to shop are spoiled for choice, so if you don't offer them what they want right away, they will simply go someplace else. They expect different payment methods to be available, but credit cards get the most use because they are so convenient and the money doesn't have to be in a checking account right away. They also generate more revenue from impulse purchases.

Credit card transactions can be made to be accepted in two different ways by most ecommerce sites. The first is just by having a merchant account through the entrepreneur's bank and the second is to use a separate service to process all transactions.

Internet businesses have a much harder time gaining approval for merchant accounts than brick and mortar retail businesses despite the fact that almost all banks offer merchant accounts and processing gateways to all of their account holders.

PayPal and other third party services do away with the need for an account with the merchant. They also offer real time payment and fund transfer into the account of a business owner for a small fee, which is usually a small flat rate plus a percentage of each transaction's sale.

This makes PayPal an obvious choice for internet businesses. It's one of only a handful of services that will give you all of the tools necessary for operating your transactions. It can accept credit cards, and quickly at that, while giving you robust features such as a shopping cart, real-time foreign currency exchange, and the tools necessary to bring in many different forms of payment from debit cards to echecks.

PayPal and other third-party services present a more easily obtained method of banking for the newly starting small business. Their services are often also more affordable than typical banks and they are significantly faster at processing credit card transactions too.

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