How to Accept Credit Card Payments
You’ve got a great product to sell online, an idea for an ebook or you’ve just bought resale rights to another writer’s products. Your website is all set up and ready for traffic. Just one problem though – how will your customers pay you? Here are Smartzville’s best bets for accepting credit card payments online…
Process Payments Online – Credit Card, Debit Card, or Bank Transfer
Question: Is there a ‘best’ company, a superior service for credit card processing and other online payments for your products or services?
There are thousands of merchant account and third party providers with just as many methods for accepting payments online. Determining which one is right for your company or niche website is the hard part.
Shocking! The payment partners that fork over the highest commisions to their affiliates are the ones you’ll hear the most about – and the ones that are most used. But there are better alternatives. Choices that will save your company money in the long run. Choices that lend credibility to your company. (And in today’s tough marketplace, credibility is a key concern for business.)
The two most recognized and heavily promoted payment processors are listed below. They are perfect for start-up niche authors, and have a solid online reputation. However, if you are an established business searching for online payment processors and merchant accounts, just leave me a note below and I will reply personally with the best reliable credit card payment processor running the best deals right now.
Payment Processor for Digital and Subscription Based Sales – Clickbank
If you’re not a brick and mortar retail store and you plan on providing digital products or subscriber access to a website, ClickBank is still considered number one. They may just be the biggest credit card processor for downloadable reports and ebooks. ClickBank comes highly recommended for the online niche marketer. Why? Because sooner or later you will want an army of affiliates sending you website traffic and customers. ClickBank does all that heavy lifting since most marketers browse affiliate opportunities on ClickBank regularly.
Finding and managing affiliates via the ClickBank network requires no extra work on your part. Affiliate marketers in the know (other niche-market promoters) will find out about your product just from surfing the Clickbank marketplace. We all do this at least once per month to see what new products can be offered to our email lists, through pay-per-click, or on our websites to earn commission.
Affiliate marketers will advertise your link and/or recommend your info-product in exchange for your advertised commission rate (ranging from 10-100%). Industry standard is a minimum of 40% payment to your affiliates – any less and not too many marketers will pick your product to promote – after all promoting a product can be costly – either in money or in work involved.
Now don’t worry that you don’t have time to manage an affiliate team and write checks to them. ClickBank collects all payments and mails both of you a check. You don’t even need to keep records!
The cost to set up an account with ClickBank is $50, but you can sell a multitude of products on any number of websites with just one account. This is one $50 charge you won’t mind on your credit card statement. With clever promotion, both you and your ClickBank discovered affiliates will be receiving checks around the same time the registration fee shows up on your credit card!
Payment Processor for Selling Products #2 – PayPal
The second service I use and recommend is PayPal. PayPal is the best known (due to it’s increased use on ebay.com) payment processor. Only take this route if need some fast cash or if you plan on selling every copy of your product yourself (without affiliates).
PayPal has recently added a few new features to it’s service offering – namely affiliate management (still not as smooth as Clickbank’s interface), and subscription payments. Due to ClickBank and PayPal co-branding their service, you can set up subscription payments now from either company. PayPal automatically bills your customer and pays you on a pre-determined schedule without fault. If you were running any kind of membership site or monthly billed service PayPal is the one for you.
There are currently no start up fees to open an account with PayPal and you can start receiving money right away from your ebay sales or website purchases. A great way to get going with your online business. Transaction fees can be high so do your homework first. If you’re serious about your business get your own merchant account with much lower fees!
Registration is free at PayPal but don’t use it as a long term solution. If you can manage it right off, register for a business account (it looks more professional at the payment screen for your visitors to see a business name than rather than a personal email address).
