Taking payments on your website

Taking online payments, or payments via your website for goods and services. That’s how everyone is doing things now isn’t it? Well its true that a lot of small businesses are finding that dealing through the web is a very efficient way of not only supplying their customers but getting more customers through the ‘virtual shop door’ as it were.

But how do you get started? Do you just create a form and ask people to put their credit card details in it? NO, really no, please don’t do that. And please don’t put your details into anything that you are not sure is absolutely soundly secure.

In fact, ideally, don’t take details of card payments actually on your site at all but get them dealt with by a third party. Will you pay for this? Yes, of course. They are not going to offer you their services for nothing, but believe me they are well worth the commission they will charge.

This is where I think Paypal gives you a good start, particularly if you are a small business or just starting up in business on the web and you want to put your toe in the water. No, they are not the cheapest around. However their accounts are easy to set up and their customer service is good, responding quickly to queries. Their website has improved immensely in the last few years meaning you can now easily create buttons to put on your site that link back to your account. You can even have a Paypal shopping cart. And all with the piece of mind, for you and your customers, that payments are being dealt with on their secure servers, safely away from your website.

Plus Paypal can now take payments from all kinds of credit and debit cards. (Previously your customers had to have an account with Paypal to use them.)

Once you have got started, business is going well and you are selling lots from your site, you may find the Paypal commission a little high. So make enquiries with your own bank. You will find many of them have their own online systems that are available for small business. You will probably need a merchant bank account with them.

Start small but always start safe when taking online payments.

Do let me know what you think by leaving comments below.

This entry was posted on April 12, 2011 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Organise life online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.