Accepting Payments Online
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If you are going to succeed with an online home based business, it is vital that you accept payments online. Most people will not pick up a phone or send a fax to place an order with you unless your product or service is truly one-of-a-kind that they can't get anywhere else. You want your customers' shopping experience to be seamless and easy since all it takes for them to leave your site and shop somewhere else is a single click of the mouse.
Accepting payments online doesn't have to be difficult. There are many options available that make it easy to take payments even if you don't have any web programming skills. One of the easiest ways to accept payments online is with a Pay Pal account. Pay Pal is an online payment processor who allows you to accept credit cards, debit cards and eChecks online. They are very well known and have a fantastic reputation of being a very secure way to pay for items online which means it will make your customers more comfortable placing orders with you.
With a Pay Pal account, when someone submits a payment the money is immediately available to you. I would recommend setting your Pay Pal account up as a business account. If you already have a personal Pal Pal account you can easily convert it to a business account. Once you do you can get a free debit card from Pay Pal which allows you to immediately withdraw your money from any ATM. Without the card you can either transfer the money directly into your bank account (which takes about 4 days) or request a check from Pay Pal (which takes about 2 weeks). As you can see the debit card is the fastest option for getting access to your money.
Setting up a Pay Pal account is free. They charge a processing fee on orders which is around 2.5-2.9% depending upon your sales volume. This is well in line with the fees that any merchant account would charge and much lower than many. The fee is automatically deducted immediately when the payment is sent.
The Pay Pal shopping cart buttons are super easy to incorporate into your website, too, making it a fast solution for setting up a shopping cart for your items.
Again, as with website hosting and registering a domain, if you have chosen to go with an existing storefront option such as Yahoo Shops, you do not need to set up a separate payment processing system since it is already included in your package. I would still recommend setting up a Pay Pal account, however, since it is the easiest way to take payments for online auctions.
To learn more about Pay Pal, decide if it is the right option for you, and set up an account, go here: