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How do you accept payments online? Who are the best
online payment processors to use?
These are questions we will attempt to answer
here. Naturally, we think the ones we use presently are the best, but one
size does not fit all when designing an online payment
solution.
Price should NOT be your most important
consideration... when it comes to keeping your business online and
your customers happy, you should be willing to pay a bit more for a
robust payment processing solution.
Too many horror stories out there where the website owner used freebie software
for all the different components, and then one day the gateway and the merchant account and the payment processor software have a conflict, and
everybody wants to blame the other guy's script, nobody wants to take responsibility...and
the client is left with a payment processing solution that doesn't
function.
And there goes his
business down the tubes. This is exactly what happened to one of my
clients. She had a thriving online business earning around two
thousand dollars a day, and one day her shopping cart just stopped
functioning. It took her seven months (SEVEN MONTHS!!!! What??) to
get her site back up and running because a succession of webmasters
had no luck integrating the scripts and gave up. All her existing
clients had left for greener pastures, she had to start from
scratch.
When time is of the essence, it's often
better to go with a package deal all from one payment processor,
such as Paypal or Netbilling.
Their own programmers do the install on your server, or you use
their server, or it's a simple button code to be added to your site
html but either way if you run into problems, they have to
take care of it.
Your choice of payment
processor is going to depend on what sort of business you have and
what you sell. For example, Clickbank does extremely well for
digital products that are downloaded immediately. If you're selling
items that will need to be shipped, the
simplest and best known online payment processor is
Paypal.
Some
people still believe having a Paypal button on your site is very
unprofessional looking, and while that may have been true in the old
days, Paypal has gained a lot of respect and trust due it's
longevity and reliability...and of course being owned by eBay
doesn't hurt either.
If you have a subscription or
membership site and need recurring billing, automatic password
generation and protected member areas, accepting payments through
Netbilling and Authorize.net and the like may be your best bet.
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