Information and starting points helpful in setting up services to accept credit card payments online. how-to information for beginner webmasters -- do-it-yourself website design, development, promotion & maintenance at little or no cost. last revised 02/27/06 the wannabe webster or, the adventures of a new kid in cyberspace website design & webmaster resources for the e-business beginner trapped in a frame? ...best resource links ...best check-up links

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accepting credit card payments online Many people don't like to give out credit card information online. Unfortunately it is the general wisdom that a business loses many if not most of its potential customers if it does not one way or another accept credit card payments online. Accepting credit card payments online is an ever changing area. There are several ways to accept credit card payments. Some of these ways require the ecommerce webmaster to pay a hefty fee up front and a hefty monthly fee. At least one, on the other hand, pays you to sign up with them. Merchant accounts, gateways and shopping carts A turnkey service is much easier by far if you're just starting up. If you are new to the internet and starting small, a turnkey (all-in-one) service is going to give you the least number of challenges, hurdles and hassles. In getting things to work or later tracking down problems with purchases and payments, you have only one tech support, one customer service and one set of passwords to deal with. Compared to setting up a turnkey, it is enormously complex and expensive to set up shopping cart, gateway and merchant account -- even when you start with one or two of the components being offered free. For the beginner, a turnkey service makes most sense because setting up your site's ability to accept credit cards is going to be much easier to get done and out of the way. This gives you a lot more time to concentrate on search engine listings and rankings and on finding similar sites for reciprocal links. You can always move to a more expensive, more complex and possibly more reliable service later on. Fees for these services range from a tiny percent (PayPal) to 15% (iBill), but it may well be that you can expect to get what you pay (as is the rule most of the time in life). Paying less may mean less customer assistance for you or your customers and slightly less reliability with regard to glitches and down times - and problems may well go up as the numbers of transactions increase. ClickBank    iBill PayPal    ShopThings Accepting credit card payments and possibly personal check payments online is essential to ecommerce. To do this you need to set up a "shopping cart" - either using your own shopping cart software or a shopping cart service online. The shopping cart is a form that describes your products and gives choices of colors, sizes, shapes, numbers, etc. and input fields for the customer to tell you how many of what is to be purchased. Credit card information needs to be given and this needs to be on a secure server (https://...) This information needs to then be transmitted to a "gateway" service which takes the credit card information and then interfaces with your "merchant account" -- a special banking account with a bank that will accept credit card payments and forward them to you. This all seems more complicated than it needs to be and - thanking necessity as the mother of invention - there are a few services that will do all three parts for you "under one e-roof." These all-in-one services are called "turnkey services" and the offer a combined shopping cart, gateway and merchant account, all in one package. Though only a year ago there were several turnkey services available, there must have been some problems that I haven't heard of because many dropped by the wayside. However, there are some alternatives to putting together the three separate components (the shopping cart to send information to the gateway which interfaces with the bank and your merchant account). These are listed below, mixed with the other services and starting points, and are also listed in the insert on turnkey services to the right. If you want to go with searching out the three components, you need to be careful that each works well with the other. Each usually has an online list of services they interface well with. Turnkey service(s) - all-in-one shopping cart, gateway and merchant account services. Again, a turnkey service is one that is pretty much all set up and ready to go as soon as you sign up. A few years ago there were several of these services available. Now there are only a few. PayPal is cheapest, charging only a small percentage of each sale (a little less than 5%). ClickBank offers credit card processing only for digital products sold online for a fee of $1 + 7.5% on each sale (there's also a $50 setup fee). A new service (at least to me) is ShopThings which charges a flat 12% of each sale. iBill weighs in at the spendiest and most polished at a fee of 15% per sale. Beware the fly-by-nights. It is important to make sure you connect up with a company that has some credibility and visibility in the world as it is quite possible to stumble onto a fly-by-night that might make life very complicated. Though credit card companies may insure users against mis-use of their cards, it can be embarrassing to have to notify all your customers that they need to check and make sure they didn't get over-charged by a company you thought you could trust. Please be aware that the services below are the ones I thought it would be good to keep a list of. I tried not to include any service that felt at all possibly suspect or "flaky" (there have been a couple I wouldn't list), but I was unable to check out all of the ones that I have listed in detail. International payments. Also note that if you expect any international interest in your product, your credit card processing service should be able to accept credit cards internationally. Not all can. Because all this stuff changes so rapidly, take the time to thoroughly research when you're ready to sign up to accept credit card payments online. Expect it to take anywhere from a few hours to a week to set your site up for credit cards. services - starting points You can find a variety of pieces of advice about setting up merchant accounts and other aspects of a web business here:   Merchant Account Forum - Free information and advice on how to accept credit cards online. Below are brief descriptions and/or reviews of some of the many services I found in cyberspace. I'll be updating this list as I have time and experiences.

Cardservice International - gateway Cardservice International has a broad range of options for small businesses -- for businesses on and/or off the internet for a variety of small fees. They handle international credit cards and offer several services. ClickBank ClickBank accepts credit card payments online (for digital products) and has a form of an affiliate program between ClickBank-using websites where one websites can earn 5% to 50% commission on referrals to one another. They assert that the websites using their service get about 30% of their business through ClickBank. Clickbank has two types of programs for merchants -- one for merchants selling digital goods and services and another for merchants that sell goods that must be shipped to the consumer. The charges for the first type is $49 one time setup fee and $1 plus 7.5% per transaction. The second type is pricier at $100 setup, $50 monthly and $0.25 per transaction (for the first $1K of transactions per month). Charge.com Charge.com boasts that they'll pay you a reward if you find a cheaper service. As yet I haven't used them. Digibuy.com Digibuy.com is an electronic commerce solution for publishers of software, shareware, electronic art, information, and data. Using DigiBuy's turnkey service, you can quickly and inexpensively build a secure storefront to merchandise your products, take orders online, process payments, and distribute digital products over the Internet. eCharge eCharge says they "offer two easy ways to make website purchases: eCharge Net Account and eCharge Phone. eCharge Net Account works like a credit card--without the credit card numbers or risk of fraud. With eCharge Phone, you can charge digital goods directly to your telephone bill." There are no set-up fees, no annual fees, and they say on their site that eCharge "offers competitive interest rates" but I couldn't find anywhere where these were detailed.

E-Commerce Exchange ETI - ElectronicTransfer.com This service says they specialize in helping vendors that require credit card processing in the areas of non-face-to-face transactions, internet transactions, extremely high monthly volume vendors, high risk merchants and membership merchants. iBill - turnkey iBill charges a flat 15% on sales that go through them and $10/month if you need a store hosted with them. They take international credit cards, offer customer support for your customers and seem to have a lot more polish than the other turnkey options, but you pay a bit more for their service. They can also provide hosting and website design help for your store if you haven't got that part going yet. iBill looks sharp and very corporate and professional.

ITransact.com - gateway Brags that it can get you accepting credit cards online the same day you sign up. NorthAmericanBancard.com - gateway Offers $500.00 to any business that can find a less expensive alternative to their credit card processing service. This just recently came up on my radar and I haven't looked into it in detail.

PayByCheck - all-in-one For the small ecommerce merchant that can't afford monthly and set-up fees and who wants only one company to deal with and who wants to sell and ship tangible products. PayPal is the easiest and most convenient service to set up. It is the most convenient to use and keep track of dollars in and out. It is shopping cart, gateway and merchant account combined. AND, it is the cheapest to set up and accept credit card payments online with. PayPal is not just free to sign up with. They have frequent sign up bonuses and offers to entice. BUT, on the other hand, PayPal has it's detractors www.paypalsucks.com.   [I use PayPal as one of two options (PayPal vs. major credit card -- MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx) on my website. 38% of my customers choose PayPal over the major credit cards option -- MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx combined.]

SecurenetShops.com - shopping cart Secure Net Shops says its the best shopping cart on the web and says they processed $73M of credit card sales in 2001. Very polished as far as shopping carts go. $229/an and $149 for setup of gateway and merchant account -- pricing is off the SERVICES page. (I haven't tried the service -- check it out.) ShopThings.com - all-in-one ShopThings.com offers all in one credit card processing for a flat percentage of 12%. This service is new on my radar. It appears to provide acceptance of international credit cards. Check it out. Verisign - gateway Verisign is apparently a very serious name in internet security and competence that is reaching out into all sorts of areas to capitalize on their reputation. Being a gateway service for accepting credit card payments online is one of their services. To set up one of several types of credit card payment processing accounts, there is a fee for start-up beginning with $179 and monthly fees beginning with $19.95. WebstockNet.com - shopping cart

articles and information about credit cards & such Merchantworkz Articles, information and webmaster resources for ecommerce wannabes. Articles on understanding various issues, identifying shady e-commerce services, setting up services to accept credit card payments online, etc. digital downloads for sale MPPGlobal.com Services to help sell digital works - audio artistries, software, etc. - online. This is an increasingly attractive option for consumers who want their purchases available now, now, now, right now, now, please. This is an area that I am just now exploring. More to this section of the site later, as I either step in poop and find wonders avilable. Note:   Recommendations on this or any other page on my web sites are candidly made on the basis of what I really believe, but keep in mind I'm not suggesting I'm all-Knowing and I'm offering no guarantees or warrantees.    The little blinking star indicates services or products from sites that will pay me a commission if you purchase something -- if you arrive on their site from this site.                 g. johnson

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